Thanks for the share!

Since this has seen some interest – here’s how much disk space this opulence costs: Arch x86 repository is 113 Gb and Arch ARM is 123 Gb :)

I have my homeserver rsync three Arch mirrors and three Arch ARM mirrors in rotation on three days every week. Thus I have full local repos for these. All my machines are configured to use this local repo. The reason I do this is precisely to be prepared for the inevitable ‘Internet is broken’ scenario.

Also Reticulum Network Stack! Much more ambitious than Meshtastic.

Cosmic supposedly does tiling pretty well. Haven’t tried it yet, but it might be the one new thing I’ll try since going all in on i3 / sway a long time ago…

Thanks for tipping the previewer’s name. Not concerned with the (valid) sec aspect personally, but I’ve accidentally hit space a couple of times since meta+shift+space is Sway’s default for floating / tiling a window and I don’t use the preview anyway. Let’s uninstall.

Gnome 48 arrived on Arch and guess what – absolutely nothing broke! The only change was that fonts on non-Gnome apps got a little bit bigger. Quickly found a new switch in dconf-editor to the effect of ‘let the framework decide how to display fonts or respect user’s settings’ – flicked that from ‘Automatic’ to ‘Manual’ and everything was back to how it ought. Best Gnome update ever <3

Unmounting is enough if the disk has spindown configured. I’ve got this in /etc/udev/rules.d/ : ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ENV{ID_SERIAL_SHORT}=="S2H7J9FZB02854", RUN+="/usr/bin/hdparm -S 70 /dev/%k"

You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve found Arch is it. My desktop install was in December 2018: Sway with Gnome apps. Save for Gnome rolling dice on every major update, it’s been perfectly boring and dependable.

It’s a map of fairground lots for a service that takes bookings, bills the customer and deals with providing relevant safety info to authorities. In use again this season :)

I made an interactive map: drew in Inkscape, gave the interactive elements numbers for ids, then substituted the id=‘xxx’ in vim with the php code and js function calls, picking up the number from the id tag and inserting it appropriately in php code and function arguments. 250 interactive elements taken care of in a single vim substitute. My bestest development power move yet :D

Here’s one that uses and likes Gnome apps (on Sway, so no automagic adaptation to changes in the framework), and strongly dislikes the major updates that always break at least a handful of things… Oh well, here we go again.

• daily important stuff (job stuff, Documents folder, Renoise mods) is kept synced between laptop, desktop and home server via Syncthing. A vimwiki additionally also syncs with the phone. Sync happens only when on home network.

• the rest of the laptop and desktop I’ll roll into a tar backup every now and then with a quick bash alias. The tar files also get synced onto home server’s big file system (2 TB ssd) via Syncthing. Home server backs itself up on it’s own once a week.

• clever thing is that the 2 TB ssd replaced an old 2 TB spinning disk. I kept the old disk and set up a systemd thing that keeps it spun down, but starts and mounts it once a week and rsyncs the changes to the ssd over, then unmounts it so that it sleeps again for a week. That old drive is likely to serve for years still with this frugal use.

It could be that you’re trying to boot images that only do uefi boot? Or is the machine old enough to not support 64-bit stuff? I resurrected my first Thinkpad (2003) with a Debian 32-bit install, that’ll surely boot on yours as well!

‘No AI has been involved in creating this article.’ I like that. Reminds of ‘no synthesizers on this record’ of the 80s :D

Just recently I learned that one can also define functions in .bash_aliases. Very handy.

grim + slurp ftw. On my system mod+ctrl+s -> select area by drawing a box -> screenshot saved as shot.png in the Downloads directory where even sandboxed apps can read it. Next shot just overwrites the previous one.

Re Microsoft in general. I had to install Powershell on Linux recently to get a work related task done. It was packaged on the Arch User Repository, so easily done.

Got the task done and went to uninstall Powershell and realised there that the installed size was 186 MB. Checked the installed size of Linux-zen kernel and modules: 143 MB. So this tiny MS command-line utility was heftier than the kernel and drivers for all supported hardware. How do they even manage that?

I’ve had to learn heavy duty bashing for work, and happily did take the plunge. However, they also had me learn PHP and I’ll drop this as a hook and line for OP: you can do shell-script duties with PHP also, and once you hit your head on sed enough times, I hope you remember me telling this. All that string manipulation is much nicer with PHP functions, and for running shell commands there is shell_exec(). :)

I recently discovered kmscon: a hardware accelerated utf-8 & emoji capable replacement for the standard Linux console. Put that on.