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All Articles (133)

Firefox: hide pop‑ups (or any web page element)

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.....

Encrypt any block device

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.....

Disable the Linux kernel watchdog

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.....

Conky & Lua

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.....

Record system audio output with ALSA

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.....

Disable a USB port and the connected hard drive

And enable it when required. Also see this related article. Premise & problem I have a USB hard drive used only for weekly automated backups. It is always connected to the same port and never gets removed. At all other times I want this drive to be unmounted, off, invisible, powered down. I wa.....

Use dash as /bin/sh

This article only slightly expands on what the archwiki says about it. Linking /bin/sh to dash instead of bash is not the same as "changing your default shell". I want startup scripts and everything that has a #!/bin/sh shebang to use the lightest possible shell by default, but I still want my tru.....