Conky is good for displaying things on the desktop. But it has a few disadvantages: There's no option to continuously show the output of a command (or file), like tail -f or dmesg -w, and update conky's output as that output grows. [X] Some internal conky commands measuring system resources are bug...

Towards the end (points 4. and 5.) this article has instructions on how to encrypt/decrypt any string. It might come in handy when e.g. checking your Email with curl, because one wouldn't want the password in plain text either on the command line or in some file. Here's a slightly refined version: o...

You want to see how your Linux system reacts to a certain peripheral being plugged in (smartphone, monitor, USB stick etc.). dmesg can provide that information, but one needs to separate it from previous messages. Here's how: Make sure the device in question is unplugged. Open a terminal, maximise ...

Muurola is close to Rovaniemi, the capital of the Finnish part of Lapland. The library there will be celebrating their 20th Linux anniversary on Thursday, May 2nd at 6pm. I just got this info from a friendly person living up there and am happy to pass it on: I am wondering if you have any contacts ...

This article concentrates on setting up a calendar server on an already running nginx server and importing existing content into the newly created empty calendar / address book, ready for syncing across devices. Initial situation I rely a lot on my digital calendar, but currently it resides on my un...

Since Version 4.2.0 GNU bash can print times in strftime format with printf. OK, the external date command can do a lot that bash's builtin cannot do, but for most use cases this is enough - and it's always better to use builtins, because if you're using bloated bash, at least take full advantage of...

The man command uses a pager, that is responsible for pagination, but also search and highlight. If your pager is less, you can search man pages with /search string. It will then highlight the search results, and they can be traversed with n/N. The highlighting helps to find the search string, but i...

Let's agree on a few things: the original infinality patched freetype packages are outdated and cannot ne used anymore at least 50% of what infinality did to improve the looks is about sane defaults, a careful configuration and installing the right fonts according to this one will need at least fre...