My control key was broken, but I found that when I used an app and held down the space bar key, the CPU would get abnormally hot.

So I wrote an Emacs interrupt to interpret a rapid CPU rise as “press the control button”.

Unfortunately the dev pushed an update that broke space bar heating, which broke my workflow. I opened a bug report about it, though…

I had to use unity game engine for one of my assignments for school, but unity wouldn’t generate files needed for the language server unless I set the code editor to vscode. I fixed this by creating a bash script with the path /usr/bin/code that opens neovim in konsole.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
konsole -e "nvim $@"

intel won’t allow its linux drivers to work above wifi 4 speeds in ap mode, so i created a kvm virtual windows machine with pci pass through on the wifi nic plus ip masquerade and now i’m getting wifi 6 speeds in ap mode.

I’m using Gentoo with systemd and a customized kernel, and additionally I have the /usr partition LUKS encrypted. Because /usr is absolutely essential for systemd to function, I configured dracut to make a specially crafted initrd which activates the luks lvm and prompts for the password to decrypt and mount /usr on startup before systemd init tries to run.

About a year or two ago, some update to dracut or some other dependency (assumption) caused the dracut generated initrd’s to kernel panic. After multiple days of troubleshooting, I discovered that just copying forward an older initrd in /boot and naming it to match the new kernel, e.g. initramfs-6.6.38-gentoo.img , allows the system to boot normally .

So, my Gentoo is booting a kernel 6.6.something with a ramdisk generated in the 5.9 kernel era. I am dreading the day when this behavior breaks and I can no longer update my kernel 😳

Here’s a few of the micro-hacks that I’ve hacked up in the past.

#!/bin/sh  

clear  
doas chroot /linux /bin/login

#!/bin/sh
#Works only for C
vim $1.c && cc -O3 -Wall -Werror -Wno-unused-result $1.c -o $1
#MODE=`stat -f "%OLp" $1`
if ("stat -f "%OLp" $1 | grep -e 6 -e 4 -e 2") then
	chmod +x $1
fi

#!/bin/sh

#dos2unix -O -e -s $1 | sed 's/    /	/g' | sed 's/“/"/g' | sed 's/”/"/g'
cat $1 | sed 's/    /	/g' | sed 's/“/"/g' | sed 's/”/"/g'
#Convert DOS line endings to Unix ones and add a final newline if there isn't one,
#replace sequence of 4 spaces with tab,
#and replace "smart" quotes with normal ones

I just keep those ones for historical value, but there’s one hack I use every day. My keyboard doesn’t have a function key (Fn), so I use the Super/Windows key instead.
I have xdotool keyup Super_L keyup Super_R keyup F4 key XF86Sleep bound to a custom keyboard shortcut. It unpresses the keys used for the shortcut (Super + F4), then presses the sleep key.

wayland.windowManager.sway.config.keybindings = let
    # ...
    screenshot = with pkgs; writeShellScriptBin "screenshot.sh" ''
          DATE=$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
          if [ "$1" = "full" ]; then
            ${grim}/bin/grim ~/Pictures/shot_$DATE.png
            ${libnotify}/bin/notify-send "saved full screenshot to shot_$DATE.png"
          elif [ "$1" = "full-copy" ]; then
            ${grim}/bin/grim - | ${wl-clipboard}/bin/wl-copy -t image/png
            ${libnotify}/bin/notify-send "copied full screenshot"
          elif [ "$1" = "sel" ]; then
            ${grim}/bin/grim -g "$(${slurp}/bin/slurp)" ~/Pictures/sel_$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S").png
            ${libnotify}/bin/notify-send "saved selection to sel_$DATE.png"
          elif [ "$1" = "sel-copy" ]; then
            ${grim}/bin/grim -g "$(${slurp}/bin/slurp)" - | ${wl-clipboard}/bin/wl-copy -t image/png
            ${libnotify}/bin/notify-send "copied screenshot"
          else
            printf "Invalid argument: '$1'\n"
          fi
          '';
  in lib.mkOptionDefault { # ...

This is in my Home Manager configuration. I don’t think this is that bad, it’s just kinda messy. If you can’t tell, it’s a script for taking screenshots, embedded in my configuration.

I like to use unclutter to hide my mouse pointer after a few seconds without being moved.

Now, the thing is, it doesn’t just visually hide the cursor, it actually removes it, so UI elements triggered by hovering disappear. Sometimes that’s great, other times it’s infurriating, like when reading a tooltip or menu.

I mostly use a touchpad, and so I developed a habit to wiggle my finger while I’m intentionally hovering something, so that there was enough mouse movement for unclutter to not remove my pointer.

Then I found a setting for the jitter threshold of the touchpad. Basically, with the threshold on, it ignores tiny movements, because the hardware reports finger wiggling, even if you hold your finger perfectly still. Which is perfect for me to turn off.

Now when I have my finger on the touchpad, it automatically wiggles and allows me to read hover elements. If I take my finger off, it stops wiggling and removes the cursor.
It’s almost like someone designed an OS with touchpads in mind, rather than them being an afterthought.

I made a script to add a middle click scroll function with a toggle. I can share the script, it’s a really bash script

I think this one beats them all.

My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn’t even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn’t expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won’t work anymore.

The solution?

• My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
• Because I don’t want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
• When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
• On the server, there’s a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

I’ve been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.

About a decade ago I was playing a game on Linux and the game crashed and took the entire DE with it. So I went to a different tty and started a fresh x desktop session and started playing again until the game crashed again (I was running a bunch of mods so it would crash every couple of hours or so) and still didn’t feel like rebooting so I went to yet another tty and started yet another x desktop session. I did this about 3 times in total before I finally went “I should probably actually reboot because this has to be making a bigger mess of things”

Well it was more like a temporary duct tape, but I “installed” a copy of Ubuntu in RAM from the running Ubuntu system so that I could “boot” (pivot_root) into it without restarting it

All because I didn’t want to wait on a ticket for my dedicated server provider to hook in a KVM LOL

(See my meme post I posted to c/linuxmemes a few weeks back for more info)

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

bindntr=CTRL,C,exec,hyprctl dispatch closewindow alacrittyclipboard & hyprctl activewindow | rg -q "class: Wfica" && alacritty -qq --config-file ~/.config/alacritty/alacrittyclipboard.toml --class 'alacrittyclipboard' --title 'Office365 Desktop - Nexus (SSL/TLS Secured, 256 bit)' -e sh -c 'sleep .03 && xclip -o | wl-copy ; wl-paste | xclip -i'
windowrulev2 = float,class:(alacrittyclipboard)
windowrulev2 = stayfocused,class:(alacrittyclipboard)
windowrulev2 = noborder,class:(alacrittyclipboard)
windowrulev2 = noanim,class:(alacrittyclipboard)
windowrulev2 = noblur,class:(alacrittyclipboard)
windowrulev2 = opacity 0,class:(alacrittyclipboard)
windowrulev2 = maxsize 1 1,class:(alacrittyclipboard)

Fixes the fucking clipboard in citrix, no, I cannot figure out a better solution.

the move to aquamarine with hyprland mostly resolved this… but not completely and i’m going to have to write a new duct tape solution for that.

If you’re wondering why I launch alacritty… it doesn’t work without alacritty, wayland needs the window to be in focus, if alacritty isn’t there there’s no in focus window and it doesn’t update the clipboard.

My mother uses some software that runs in the browser for her shop. It can print out receipts and scan items. To do these things it has a small “sattelite” application that runs on the system and interacts with the printer and scanner. This software only runs on Windows and Linux doesn’t have drivers for the scanner.

When I switched her over to Linux and found this out in the process I wanted to stop, give up and install windows.

But then I had a stupid idea. I could run the sattelite program in a Windows VM and pass through the USB devices for receipt printer and scanner. The webapp uses requests to localhost:9998 to communicate with the sattelite so I set up a apache server that proxies these requests into the VM. I also prevented the VM from acessing the Interner so Windows doesn’t update and screw everything up.

And it works. It has been in use for a week now and I’ve heard no complaints. I’m just praying to god it doesn’t break

So I use a surface device with the Linux surface kernel, and there was (and probably still is) an issue where the type cover doesn’t properly rebind after being detached and re-attatched. To make matters worse, connecting other USB devices disconnected the type cover. My solution was to make a udev rule that detected if the keyboard is “removed” and then try to rebind it, effectively unplugging it and plugging it back in again in software.