Tag: Linux

I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice for the last few years. Howerver, DuckDuckGo seems to have a few problems:

1. It is based in the US, arguably not the most privacy-respecting jurisdiction in the world.
2. Only part of their source code is open.
3. Uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud provider and Cloudfare CDS.
4. It looks like their browser was caught tracking visited websites per user.
5. At the end of the day, you can’t really know that they are telling the truth when they promise not to track you.

In this post, I’m discussing Searx, a better alternative to DuckDuckGo that is truly open and driven by the community.

GNU screen is a terminal multiplexer that allows for different virtual windows and panes running different processes within the same terminal session, being it local or remote. This post contains a quick reference to the most used default key bindings of GNU screen. In contrast to other terminal multiplexers like tmux, GNU screen is probably already installed in your server of choice.

A while back I changed my bar from Polybar to i3bar with i3blocks. One of the things I missed about Polybar is its internal CPU module, which can produce a core load graph directly in your bar by adding the right ramp characters. In this post I’m sharing a simple POSIX shell script I’ve written that does the same and can be used with any text-based bar. Here is what it looks like:

I have a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet for my occasional drawing and signing. By default, the tablet area is mapped to the whole screen area, making it almost unusable if you are using two or more monitors, as your drawing application of choice (Krita in my case) usually resides in one display only.

Well, turns out there’s a very easy way to map the tablet to a single display in Linux with xinput. But first, we need to find out the display we want to map the table to with xrandr.

A little over a year ago, in January 2020, I got myself a QNAP TS-351-2G 3-bay NAS in order to store all of my and my family’s data in a fail safe RAID configuration. I opted for the somewhat unconventional 3-bay setup in an attempt to trade off limited physical space at home with storage capacity. I don’t have much space in my living room for a big NAS, and the 2-bay options, albeit being very compact, are limited to RAID-1, where half of the space is used for storage and the other half is used for redundancy protection (data is basically mirrored on the second drive). In QNAP’s website there are three 3-bay Home options: the entry-level TS-332X, the middle-range TS-328 and the high-end TS-351. So I thought to myself, “I’m getting the high-end unit, how bad can it be?”. Well, now that I have been using this NAS for a year I think I can answer this question.

At home, I have a scrawny HTPC called chimp in my living room connected to the TV —as I don’t own a Smart TV for good reasons—. Even though I have a NAS in the network capable of serving media, I connected a dedicated external disk directly to chimp because my stock router is not the fastest around. Whenever I use the HTPC, I use it remotely from either my desktop, bonobo, or my laptop, simian. Sometimes I need to fetch torrents and download them to the disk connected to the HTPC. Enter Transmission. Transmission is a somewhat popular BitTorrent client that includes a ‘hidden’ command line interface which is very, very useful and simple to use. Learn to use it and you will probably never want to open a GUI torrent client ever again.