I noticed that my server's (Debian stable) datetime was way off. Years. Strange, because I was sure I had enabled systemd-timesyncd (but apparently never gave it a second thought after that). Looking at systemctl status systemd-timesyncd I found this cryptic message: ● systemd-timesyncd.service - Ne...

Situation I am using PicoCMS1. It's not installed through the global package management: all its files, content & executables (except PHP itself) are located under a single directory. This is not ideal, but common practice; and it has the advantage that it makes maintenance easier. This article ...

Are you using noscript or a similar addon, possibly uMatrix, that blocks javascript, cookies and third party requests? If so (and probably even if you don't) then you have seen web pages become virtually unreadable for all the additional nagging elelments that pop up top, bottom, left and right. Exa...

Goal A hard drive or a USB stick set up in this way is recognised by common filemanagers (e.g. Thunar, PCManFM) - it shows up as an encrypted device in the side bar, a password dialog pops up, and the twofold decrypt/mount process happens in one click. Device encryption, performance considerations W...

journalctl -b | grep watchdog; sudo dmesg | grep watchdog Both commands return something like NMI watchdog: Enabled. Permanently consumes one hw-PMU counter. I have no use for this watchdog on a desktop computer. This link already contains all the information required to disable it, but here's the m...

The README of the PicoPygments plugin (active in this blog) repository, which uses Python-Pygments and a variety of CSS styles for code block syntax highlighting.

Thanks to this article I became aware of how flexible conky's Lua configuration format is - it is effectively a Lua script. This opens almost endless new possibilities that go far beyond mere modularisation. For example, I could grab values from the system and design my conky accordingly, like I hav...

This was written & tested on an Archlinux system, but I believe it applies to most Linux/ALSA systems. ALSA loopback device We assume a single run-of-the-mill Intel sound card, mapped as card 0. We will create a virtual loopback card 1. #> modprobe snd-aloop aplay -l The loopback device works...