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Why My Webcam Image Is So Damn Red!
Read more →Why is the image on my external USB webcam suddenly so red?! My face looks like a tomato! Evidently, a setting inside the camera changed.
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Byobu Session Name in Terminal Window Title
Read more →How do I change the window title in my
byobuterminal windows so that I can find them when I switch windows in my desktop environment?! Evidently, it’s atmuxsetting. -
Viewing HEIC (HEIF) Images on Pop! OS 22.04
Read more →I had no idea what an HEIC image is until today. I had to install a newer version of the
libheiflibrary than Pop!_OS 22.04 has in their standard package manager in order to be able to view these images. -
Video Gradually and Increasingly Falling Behind: Don't Use Buffering
Read more →My external USB webcam’s video signal was gradually and increasingly falling out of sync with real life, so that within 20 minutes, I looked like a badly-dubbed movie. Fortunately, there appears to be a simple workaround while the OBS Studio programmers decide how to solve the problem for real for real.
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Upgrading Discourse When You Totally Have Enough Disk Space
Read more →In some situations, Discourse thinks you don’t have enough disk space to upgrade to the latest version, even though you actually do. There is one little switch you can use to convince the upgrade script that it’s OK to proceed.
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unWise Arithmetic
Read more →Wise’s UI reports a rounded currency exchange rate, but applies a more-precise rate when converting funds, so their arithmetic is correct, even when it looks like it isn’t.
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strptime: a Beginner's Mistake
Read more →You might want
%Ybecause%yseems right, but isn’t. -
Remove a Password from a PDF Document on Linux the Super-Easy Way
Read more →Open the file with
evince, then print a new copy to file. -
The Mysterious Extra Quotes that `jc` Put In My JSON
Read more →How I learned to deal with Byte Order Marks (BOM) in text files.
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Ducking in Screenflow
Read more →To use ducking in Screenflow, set ducking on the voiceover track only and leave the music bed track underneath alone.
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LibreOffice Calc, Headers, Footers, and Every Page!
Read more →All of a sudden, I started seeing different headers and footers on different sheets of my workbook when I printed it as a PDF. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but then I noticed a new setting I hadn’t had to deal with before….
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How Pandoc and Ranger Froze My Laptop
Read more →My laptop started freezing and its fan started screaming at the top of its lungs. I was forced to reboot. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the reason: ranger and pandoc and trying to preview OpenOffice Spreadsheet files.
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Installing hledger
Read more →When entering any new open source software community, I expect to encounter some bumpy parts getting started. I had problems installing
hledgerthat reflect both some unknown unknowns of mine and some missing details in the documentation. Nevertheless, I managed to install it. -
Pop! OS Won't Mount Any External USB Disk
Read more →I recently upgraded the kernel and needed to reboot.
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Why My Spreadsheet File is So Big
Read more →I don’t remember asking to embed fonts in this file, but evidently, I did.
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When Your Site Can't Find Its Discourse Comments
Read more →It’s November 2022 and I insist on having comments on my professional blogs, even though nobody really cares. In 2021 I began migrating comments away from Disqus (which I dislike for various reasons) towards Discourse. With Discourse, I embed a topic into each blog post, so that each post corresponds to a Discourse topic. Discourse creates a topic for each post and the comment thread of the topic becomes the comment thread of the post. Nice.
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Fix the Automatic Time Zone on Pop! OS
Read more →First turn on Location Services, then turn on Automatic Time Zone.
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Remap Keys on System76 Less Painfully
Read more →Use the package
system76-keyboard-configurator. -
Fixing Your Virtual Camera On Microsoft Teams for Linux
Read more →Reduce your resolution to 720p. :P
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Exclude Big Files From Your restic Backup
Read more →I use
resticfor backups. My backup repository was looking too big and new snapshots were adding much more data than I’d expected. I managed to cobble together a few tools to help figure out which additional directories to exclude. -
Get Push Notifications for Rate Alerts at wise.com
Read more →Wise (aka Transferwise) offers push notifications for foreign currrency exchange rate alerts, but when I tried to use them, I couldn’t figure it out. This is one of those things that is obvious in retrospect, but easily misunderstood while trying to do it.
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Stop Using My Microphone As a Speaker!
Read more →When I connect my Røde lapel microphone to my Pop!_OS machine, the OS insists on trying to use the microphone as an output device. Today I learned how to stop it from doing that.
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Install Microsoft Office 365 Inside Virtualbox
Read more →When I tried to install Microsoft Office 365 as local applications on Windows 10 inside VirtualBox on my Linux laptop, I got stuck at “We’re getting things ready for you”. It took over an hour to piece together a solution. It involved reading instructions in Indonesian. I hope that I can save you some struggling.
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Your git log output as CSV
Read more →You want to process output from
git logas CSV? Easy. Meetjqand its awesome power. -
Roll back a branch at Github
Read more →You want to roll back (“reset”) a branch in your Git repository, but you can only use Github (maybe you’re working on a Chromebook!) and there’s no obvious way to do it. Well, there’s a non-obvious way to do it, which “makes sense” if you understand Git enough.
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Change the Default Font in Master PDF Editor
Read more →I love Master PDF Editor. Sadly, when I use the Typewriter feature to annotate PDFs, a font ligature problem wreaks havoc. Changing the default font for Typewriter comments in Master PDF Editor is not obvious.
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Linux Sound and USB Microphones
Read more →Pipewire bad. If you installed Telegram, then it installed Pipewire. Bad. Disable Pipewire if you value your USB sound devices.
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A Puzzle about HTML: <details> and flexbox
Read more →Why can’t I style the content of an HTML
detailselement directly? Why do I need to wrap that in asectionordiv? I’d really like to understand the reasons, even if I find them silly. -
I Want To Listen With My Headphones, Not My Microphone!
Read more →It took me an annoyingly long time to figure out how to connect my audio devices to my Linux laptop in the “approved sequence” in order to have a sensible audio experience. This is especially helpful when trying to do last-moment preparation before a client working session!
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How To Resize A Comment Box In LibreOffice Calc
Read more →You’d think this was obvious, but it wasn’t. You have to show the comment in order to resize it (or move it around). You can’t resize it while you’re editing it.
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Print Sensibly to PDF in Firefox
Read more →Where the hell do I fix these ridiculous print margins for the header and footer when I want to print to PDF in Firefox?! Why is the header right at the edge of the page?! Oh… I see.
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Rename a Bunch of Files
Read more →There exist dozens of ways to rename a bunch of files, but my current favorite involves renaming files in bulk using the full power of a text editor. Maximum power, maximum flexibility.
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TuneIn Radio Stops Streaming After a Minute Or So
Read more →TuneIn Radio on my Android phone stopped streaming after a minute or so. I don’t know what changed, but I had to give the app permission to keep streaming.
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Linux, snap, and Mysterious File Permission Errors
Read more →I
chmod 777’d everything and still kept seeing “Permission denied”! WTF?! And then it hit me. -
Linux, Firefox, Google Hangouts, and 'Camera Not Found'
Read more →If your webcam isn’t working in Hangouts on your Linux system, try pressing
Fn+F10. -
Copy/Paste, Byobu, Scrollback Mode
Read more →I’m using Byobu’s scrollback mode (F7). I assumed that I could copy text to my system clipboard using the typical vim yank command, but no. It took me 15 minutes to learn how to do this.
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Use a Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner With Linux
Read more →I got my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M up and running with Linux with relatively little effort. Yay! One step farther away from continued reliance on MacOS!
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Fixed: I Couldn't Open A Terminal Window!
Read more →Suddenly, I couldn’t open a terminal window! How do I even diagnose the problem?! Oh, and great: my trackpad stopped working. Wow. Fortunately, I recovered, and although it annoyed me, I learned a few small things about Linux.
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rvm and byobu
Read more →If rvm tells you that it is not a function when you run byobu, then load the rvm script yourself in order to keep working.
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Using git When the Firewall Says, "No"
Read more →If
git pushfails and you’re on a strange network, then you might still be able to push your changes if you make one small change to your environment. -
Installing amp, a text editor
Read more →Recently I learned about
amp, a text editor that might lure me away fromvim. Intrigued by the idea, I tried to install it. I really tried, but I couldn’t manage it. I learned that I had some kind of dependency problem that I could solve by using the most recent tools for the Rust programming language. -
Moving to Linux: Evernote
Read more →I use Evernote and they provide no Linux client, so I need something. I can use the Android client and the web application in many situations, but not, for example, to delete large batches of notes. Fortunately, there exists a promising alternative under active development! And it seems to work!
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Add a Personal Payee Your Own Damn Self
Read more →If you use TD Canada Trust’s “personal payee” to send money to individuals like a bill payment, then it has become easier to set up a new recipient. I stumbled upon this fact today.
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No, This Album Is Not A Compilation
Read more →If your music organizer thinks an album is a compilation, but you know it was recorded by a single artist, then you might need to change the music file’s metadata. Here are some very short instructions to do just that.
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The Real Reason The WiFi Thermostats Didn't Work
Read more →If your ISP forces on you an Actiontec R3000 router, then you must read this article to avoid disappointment. No, really.
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Honeywell WiFi Thermostats Not Connecting To WiFi Network
Read more →If you have a WiFi thermostat, then consider configuring your router to give them reserved IP addresses, in order to reduce the likelihood that they have trouble joining your network.
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How To Exit Full-Screen Mode from Screen Sharing on MacOS
Read more →I didn’t find it obvious how to exit full-screen mode while using Screen Sharing on MacOS (High Sierra). Not at all.
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Moving Screenflow Markers Without Disturbing Your Clips
Read more →I nearly panicked when I realized that I might have to go through 2 hours of video clips in Screenflow and move dozens of markers in order to add in cross-dissolve transitions between clips. There had to be a better way, or I would have been in trouble. There was.
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Extracting Chapter Markers Quickly from Screenflow
Read more →I now have a trick for not waiting an hour to extract the chapter markers from a Screenflow video.
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Rescuing PDF Clerk Pro Files Made Easy
Read more →Your
.pdfpfiles are just bundles containing the contents as a single PDF file and some metadata, so it doesn’t matter that PDF Clerk Pro no longer runs on current versions of MacOS. -
unZettling, or How I Discovered That Credit Card Companies Turn Cash Advances Into Absurd Uncertainty
Read more →If you use an iZettle device to purchase something by credit card in Sweden, then check your credit card statement immediately, because your credit card company might treat the purchase as a cash advance and additional fees and interest might apply.
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Back Up an SD Card from Android
Read more →I wanted to replace the 64 GB SD card in my Galaxy Note 4 with a 128 GB SD card. I assumed that I could simply take the smaller SD card out of my phone, connect it by USB (with a USB-based SD card reader) to my MacBook, copy the contents to the larger SD card, insert the larger SD card into my phone, and then go on my merry way.
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A Little Tip for Using Typora with Pandoc
Read more →When you install Typora — and you will — you need to change one configuration setting to avoid disappointment in using what is, otherwise, a wonderful, wonderful Markdown composition tool.
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LibreOffice Calc Won't Print This Sheet!
Read more →I love LibreOffice and OpenOffice both for helping me escape from the clutches of Microsoft Office. I have donated to LibreOffice as a measure of gratitude for helping me run my business and indeed my life. Sadly, no technology product seems impervious to silly problems, and I encountered one today with LibreOffice that made me scream in frustration.
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I Can't Boot From My External USB Drive!
Read more →I take backups pretty seriously. It’s the primary reason I switched to Mac: once I learned that I could boot from an external backup drive I wanted that security. Today, when my shiny new external USB 3.0 drives arrived in the mail, I immediately started a backup, but was shocked when I couldn’t boot from the backup! Well… somewhat. I eventually got there, and it wasn’t obvious to me, so I wanted to make sure that you knew what to do.
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I Can't Find Stuff In My Markdown Files!
Read more →As I wrote previously in “Writing With Pleasure Using Markdown and Pandoc”, I use Markdown a lot for writing. I don’t use it just for writing articles, but also for writing outlines and making notes. If I draft it using plain text, then I usually use Markdown as the format.
Imagine my surprise this morning when I tried to search for an outline I’d drafted of a conference talk and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t even find it by file name. Panic!
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Handling Urgent Email With Todoist
Read more →If you use GMail, you can’t use a filter to automatically forward an urgent email to a project in Todoist. I use Mailgun as a middleman to make this automation work.
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Writing with Pleasure Using Markdown and pandoc
Read more →I write a lot, and I never know where or when my ideas will strike. In order to at least get things out of my head, I like to write in a format that I can use from just about anywhere, so I rely on Markdown. It’s plain text, which means that I can write it on my phone, my tablet, my laptop, with or without an internet connection. It’s also lightweight HTML, which means that I can add some structure to my writing, like lists, headings, and links, without distracting myself from what I’m trying to write.