I like taking pictures, and having some of the nicer ones as a background to my daily computer shenanigans is a nice extension of this. Lately, I've been playing around a bit with having pictures show up differently (more abstractly, with less details so they distract less, like those nice …

Editing and even viewing (raw) photographs can be a bit taxing on your CPU. If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can supercharge your photo editor by using its OpenCL extensions to offload operations to. Using darktable myself, I had to do a minor bit of research before it worked …

So you have this (web) application and you are growing a bit tired of having to manually bump the version number it tells to its users. Also, you would like to see if you are using an up-to-date edition of said app. Enter your Git repository. When you are running …

I very recently moved this weblog to a new host, and in the process finally changed from Apache running mod_wsgi to nginx with uWSGI and supervisor (well, at least for the Python based web apps, as dammIT is a flat site). I'm using isso as commenting system, which runs as …

In my ~/.ssh/config file, I have been using a socket file for every host that I connect to, so TCP sessions can be re-used for faster connecting to a host I already am connected to. I had several iterations of the exact filename for this, as with longer hostnames …

Andromeda is a way to theme an Android device with Substratum without needing root. You need adb though, so a desktop or laptop computer is needed to initiate the connection between the Andromeda app and Substratum. On regular machines this is not much of an issue, but Chromebooks are both …

A while ago I wrote about getting notified on battery low. It is quite useful when you leave your laptop unattended for a while, to get a notification on your phone and/or smartwatch when that laptop is about to run out of juice. It has saved me a few …

Edit at 2017-01-21: see the comments about better ways, especially comment 6. Secure Settings (Google Play) is a really helpful app to help Tasker (Google Play) do things automatically on your Android device. However, it has not been updated for quite a while (January 2015 at the time of this …

You might be in that same situation as I was until recently: you open up your ssh config file and start scrolling through the long list of nicely aliased private machines, that organically grown list of work - project A and the comment-section-divided work - project B, work - misc, work - are these …

If you don't know Tasker go and check it out now. It's by far the greatest way to automate, well, about everything on your Android device and its surroundings. However, one thing it is not, is really easy to start with. If you tap through the interface for the first …

After having one of our Hangouts videocalls, I started looking into why the browser plugin takes so much CPU-time (and makes the laptop hot and breezy in the process). Is stumbled upon the article How to tell if you're using hardware acceleration and dove into my own about:support page …

When your laptop is sitting on a table and you're doing some other stuff in the meanwhile, it might quietly be running out of battery. In that case, you likely want to be nudged to find it a power outlet before it has to shut down or hibernate. Wouldn't it …

You have this interesting project, written in Django. Maybe even in the excellent Django Rest Framework. You want to run some tests on it to know how it will cope with load under stress. Or you just want to repeat a bunch of steps from the outside a lot of …

While I was standardising my dotfiles I wanted to have an easy and quick way to update my projects so repositories weren't out of date when I wanted to use them (for example when being offline on the train), and I didn't want to go through them by hand every …

We've all been there. Well, I've been there at least; before discovering the virtues of a real version control system, I just created a snapshot of my projects by tarring and compressing the directory tree. That way I've a bunch of histories locked inside backup dir per project. When I …

I'm a fan of version control systems, as they allow me to thinker with my files (both source code and text files with notes and such) to my heart's delight without having to worry about thing getting lost. I can change and update programs, websites and such and can see …

I recently built a new at-home server, which basically is just a self-built NAS. Sharing via NFS worked immediately and other services were set up soon after. Then came Samba. Samba (or smb) is used for Windows shares, but in our home our Linux-based NAS speaks the protocol with things …

vim, the final editor. Well, for some people at least. People like me, we like to type their files, code and more inside of dark-coloured windows, mainly terminals and do not really care if those files are local on their laptop, on the server at their feet or on some …

If you are running a unix-like machine, like a Linux workstation, or BSD or Apple Mac, you might be acquainted with the ~/.ssh directory. SSH stores known hosts in their, as well as your public and private SSH keys and more important stuff. The contents of a ~/.ssh/config look …

I grew increasingly tired changing the column settings of the folders of my IMAP account in Thunderbird; I don't need the 'Read', 'Junk' and 'Thread icon' columns for example, but would like to have the 'Size' listed. However, I needed to change that for all of my dozens of mail …