This howto has been stewing for the greater part of a decade, and I finally came around to writing it as I was freshly installing Ubuntu 25.04 on my ThinkPad T480s hacktop. Most of the tweaks apply for Gnome 48 (and probably 47 still) on whatever distribution you like …

Shall I tell you something nifty? You know you can create and run containers really easily on any Linux machine, no Docker, LXC or Kubernetes (gasp!) needed? Frozen leaves inside ice Maybe you have seen the term chroot before but are not sure what it is, or maybe you are …

Last week I had a revelation. I had been having odd issues with my workstation for years, which I wrote down to storage being iffy. It ranged from games complaining about corrupt files (of course while trying to play them online, together with friends) to Firefox or Electron apps suddenly …

Lately I've had two laptops randomly glitch their screens at me. At first I worried their hinges were starting to give out (the connectors in those things are scarely fragile), but I noticed a message in dmesg: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun That …

I get way too much 'kick' out of a good font, and the Nerd Fonts project has been doing an awesome job at combining about every monospace font with glyphs/icons from FontAwesome, Devicons etc, for use in vim, terminal prompts and more. Of course I combine my frequent use …

Recently I acquired the Linux gaming handheld better known as the Valve Steam Deck, pictured above sitting on top of a cozy plaid as winter is here. Getting one was kind of a gamble for me, as I was not entirely sure I would be into handheld gaming, but I …

Today I got an email from the Google Search Console about a page, or pages on dammIT that are "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". That generally means that a website has two (very) similar pages that contain the same content, without having a element in the duplicating pages …

Are you tired of doing everything by hand, having to remote into a build server to switch to that certain user account, then type in a bunch of commands, looking them up in your shell's history? Or has your CI failed you again? Is the company behind it forcing some …

Recently, I wanted to split off a few files from a Git repository in which I keep notes to a repository of their own. Reason was that they served an entirely different purpose than the rest, so it made more sense to separate the two sets. However, they had quite …

I'm worried that this is going to be seen as a reason to not take "CRITICAL" disclosures seriously at first glance like we should. A "CRITICAL" bug MUST be treated as if it was critically bad. From a community health perspective, people have been told that something really bad is …

Canonical has a crush on snap. I don't. In Ubuntu 22.04 they replaced the native Firefox package with a snap package, making it slow and limited. It doesn't have to be that way. Mozilla's Firefox team has their own PPA for Firefox. As they use the same package name …

This weekend we did a big migration of our stack at work to a new data centre and I am stoked about how our applications and their virtual machines are set up now. Quite a bunch is already automated and having a decent base image is such a nice thing …

Yesterday evening, my little gaming group came together online to play some Counter Strike: Global Offence (CS:GO), as a deviation from our regular battles in OpenRA (which is great fun by the way). We played CS:GO before, but for some reason when I launched it from Steam now …

You might be acquainted with the Celery Distributed Task Queue, which is a proven way to process vast amounts of messages. Messages containing tasks for your software stack to eventually finish doing, for example. However, Celery is slightly cumbersome to set up (no rocket surgery, but the RabbitMQ message broker …

According to manpage, the column command “columnate lists”. In simple words, the column is a simple utility that can format your output into a column format (rows and fields) based on the structure of your source file. The column command is part of the util-linux package.

shorberg | I think total war got confused... ↪ | it thinks I have, 133 758 976 MB of VRAM tadzik | it's possible if M stands for mili ↪ | this many milibytes is just over 128 megabytes shorberg | :P ↪ | let's hope it doesn't actually try to use that much aquatix | the OOM killer likes …

Recently we got a DVD. After turning it around in our hands a few times and giggling at our reflections, we ordered an external USB DVD/CD eater so we actually could ingest some of its contents. As the hip techy people we are, having this material available to us …

Lately, I was thinking back to the time when I had my 15" CRT monitor (and later my whopping 19" flat CRT) tuned to the beats that Winamp was playing for me. It was a famous plugin called Milkdrop, and it provided nicely psychedelic looking visuals based on the audio …

Draft digging time! Something I've had in my drafts since the 25th of October, 2014, apparently: Roundcube is a decent self-hosted webmail solution, which benefits from integrating Google Contacts so you do not have to duplicate your address books (assuming you use Google for yours). Luckily someone wrote a plugin …

An update about what I do with vim, making it more powerful and taking away some of the envy I have for the excellent IDE's out there (for example PyCharm and the rest of the IntelliJ family by JetBrains - try it, it's awesome). Also, it makes vim look a lot …