Home on Psy-Q's Braindump

There are enough reasons to avoid using Spotify (and most other streaming services).

Recently I had to use Citrix on a Linux client to access some Windows remote desktops.

I’m kind of happy this war between WordPress and WP Engine happened, and I hope the people who took the severance package are doing okay.

Just two short years ago I had cobbled together a Google Photos alternative using a couple of separate pieces of free/open source software.

I used to be a big fan of Kobo ereaders because they let you install your own fonts and gave you (often, not always) DRM-free ePub files.

In some situations, you may end up with emoji displaying in color in GTK applications but not in Qt ones (such as Kate, Konsole, etc.)

If you stream audio in various formats from MPD to music clients, you may have run into a problem.

Tomáš has an interesting article on trusting APKs from third-party mirrors.

For several months now, my keyboard layout would reset to English (US) every time I log into Plasma.

Update 2025-09-17: This article is five years old.

There’s a reason for the very specific title: It seems this feature is configured a little differently on Tumbleweed than on openSUSE Leap and I haven’t found any up-to-date information on this.

I’m (re)reading a lot of Brad Warner’s books during these holidays.

A few kernel versions (or Steam versions) ago, my Dual Shock 4 controller spontaneously stopped working in Steam.

If you’re forced to use newer and more bizarre USB wifi sticks that rely on the rtl8812au/rtl8814au chipset, you need to do two things: Compile the driver yourself, since most distros don’t include one Tell NetworkManager to stop randomizing MAC addresses…

This is what I needed, I put it in /etc/udev/rules.d/80-dolphinbar.rules: SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="057e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0306", MODE="0666" I can’t remember where I found this, I’m pretty sure I didn’t figure this out for myself.

JYDGE by Finnish twin-stick shooter experts 10tons is for you if you enjoyed Hotline Miami, Robotron 2048, Crimsonland or JYDGE’s sister game Neon Chrome.

Note 2024-10-07: None of this should be necessary nowadays as the components in play here have come a long way since 2018.

If you run a combination of newer (4.9ish) kernels and systemd, your USB wifi networking gear probably now gets funky names such as “wlx74da387e95fe” instead of “wlan0” like you were used to back in the good days.

Update: There are now easier ways to manage this, for example through Lutris.

TL;DR (1072 words): The current trend towards closed communications systems like Slack, Facebook and the like can only hurt us as society.

Update: With XMPP slowly dying (at least IMHO), maybe you should consider Matrix instead of XMPP and ignore everything I write below.

Like I guessed about two years ago, Google are now trying to undermine the ad blocking market by releasing their own ad blocker, which will of course not block ads served by Google.

Canonical are apparently preparing for an IPO.

Microsoft yesterday announced Windows 10 S, a cut-down version of Windows 10 for the education market.

Some games happen to have wonderful audio (and music), like Wolfenstein: The New Order.

For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM.

The PaperColor theme has been my favorite vim color theme for quite some time now, and I’m happy to find the same theme in Atom as well, even by the same author!

Update: This issue is largely resolved nowadays because modern desktop environments include configuration tools for libinput and its acceleration profiles.

TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo!

I recently found out about the Decentraleyes add-on for Firefox.

Once again, I’m on a rampage to destroy all tearing.

If you’ve upgraded to Jessie on a server (or any other machine without X), you might have started noticing strange new messages in your logs that look like this: Nov 4 06:33:21 mail rsyslogd0: action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http…

I recently migrated email providers (several times, actually) and came across the fantastic tool mbsync.

Nvidia’s proprietary driver is notorious for having a lot of tearing and vsync issues.

In 2013, the famous online ad reseller Google shut down their Google Reader service.

Do you get log entries that look like this?

Before you throw any bricks, know that I’ve been a Jolla supporter from before day one.

I’m an seasoned nerd, semi-professional programmer, sort of a gamer, music lover and beer drinker with a weird taste.

In the last 8 years or so, I’ve regularly looked at the ebook market to figure out if they’ve fixed it yet.

For several months, I’ve been using Steffen Brüntjen’s EurKEY keyboard layout.

If you’re running KDE and Pulseaudio and have the problem that you can’t configure your audio sources in KDE’s multimedia settings, there might just be a component missing: apt-get install vlc-plugin-pulse I’m not sure if this is usually part of some KDE…

I just found this very helpful blog post by Alexander, listing the proper CalDAV/CardDAV URLs to use with SyncEvolution on Sailfish OS if you want to sync with ownCloud.

If you need Chinese character input in KDE (typing in pinyin and then selecting the correct word), it’s quite simple on Debian GNU/Linux: apt-get install task-chinese-s-kde-desktop fcitx-pinyin That’s all there is to it.

Update: Nowadays, better look into a Matrix homeserver.

In Switzerland, any registered company is forced by the government to pay a percentage of its income as church tax.

I’ve had my Jolla phone for a little over a week now and I’ve completely switched off my Android phone.

So you’ve found replacements for all the things you used to get from Google, and you’re ready to delete your account.

There is something that is so basic and common to using the Internet that I perhaps overlooked it in my earlier articles: the web browser.

After all my other posts and about a year of activity on the subject of ungoogling yourself, I have come to the point where I only depend on Google for two things: YouTube videos.

Google’s Android rules the mobile phone market like some sort of ad-flinging gorilla, and it’s not easy to escape its grasp.