Recent content in Home on Psy-Q's Braindump
There are enough reasons to avoid using Spotify (and most other streaming services). For me the big reasons are: 
 
 Bad players with very limited functionality, for example:
 
 Can’t shuffle-play your entire library 
 Can’t add your own tags and other metadata 
 Must use resource-hungry client applications, no third party clients can be used that might offer…
Recently I had to use Citrix on a Linux client to access some Windows remote desktops. I know people like to give Citrix shit all the time, I used to be one of them myself. But the Linux client actually has some really good features: 
 
 Drive and device redirection actually works 
 Wayland poses no problems for it 
 Many, many things can be customized 
 
 I want to focus…
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. WordPress has often felt more like a messy crutch than anything else, and I’ve been wanting to get rid of it for surely a decade. The thing has developed in a direction I’ve never liked, trying to be a full-fledged CMS when originally it had…
Just two short years ago I had cobbled together a Google Photos alternative using a couple of separate pieces of free/open source software. Now in 2024, things have become a lot easier. You basically need only one thing now: Immich . Both for mobile and for desktop use. 
 Development is currently in a very fast and early phase but I can say that for the last several months I had no problems at…
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. But my opinion changed a little when they bricked my beloved Kobo Aura H2O via a regular software upgrade. 
 To add insult to injury, the built-in recovery procedure is broken as well. Once your device is restored, Kobo claims that it must connect to a…
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’re sure you have a color emoji font installed (e.g. fonts-noto-color-emoji) and still get most emoji in black and white, it might be because your system default font provides black and white emoji already. The color font further down the line is…
If you stream audio in various formats from MPD to music clients, you may have run into a problem. Sometimes audio might simply go silent on a track change even though your MPD client says it’s playing the next song. This might actually have something to do with your player: some players don’t deal with audio frequency or resolution changes well. If you have audio in various…
Tomáš has an interesting article on trusting APKs from third-party mirrors . 
 Since Google is the gatekeeper of the APK trust chain, it’s not easy to independently verify APKs; Google doesn’t even give you the package signatures. The article shows a nifty method for extracting them by (ab)using the εxodus privacy audit project . 
 Do you know of a better way?
For several months now, my keyboard layout would reset to English (US) every time I log into Plasma. I’ve tried every possible way to force it to my preferred layout, EurKey , but nothing worked: xorg.conf snippets, localectl configurations, it seemed Plasma simply ignored these settings. 
 At first I blamed Plasma, but it’s innocent: The problem is Zoom! The Zoom package contains…
Update 2025-09-17: This article is five years old. Nowadays the problem is better solved using LACT . 
 My RX 580 has been giving me trouble recently. There is now an audible clicking when its fans spin up from zero RPM, and unfortunately, this happens a lot in desktop use. 
 Not wanting to invest in an aftermarket fan just yet, I looked for ways to manage the fan RPM curves while…
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. So I’m writing this down as a note to myself. 
 A default Plasma desktop will use kwallet to save passwords for various desktop services (802.11x passwords, Nextcloud/ownCloud logins,…
I’m (re)reading a lot of Brad Warner’s books during these holidays. If you ever feel like learning about no-bullshit hardcore Zen buddhism from a punk bass player and ordained Zen master (who hates that term), I can recommend: Sit Down and Shut Up, Don’t Be a Jerk and It Came From Beyond Zen, in that order. You can also try Hardcore Zen, the original work 
 Brad explains Zen…
A few kernel versions (or Steam versions) ago, my Dual Shock 4 controller spontaneously stopped working in Steam. Big Picture mode said “no controller detected” and only games that had their own native DS4 support managed to still use it. 
 Looks like you need some udev rules to make sure all things are good. For my wired DS4v2 I stuck this: 
 SUBSYSTEM == 'usb' , ATTRS {…
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 for that device 
 
 You can get the updated source from diederikdehaas’ project on GitHub . The…
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. If you need a DolphinBar, Aliexpress should have you covered . It could be that the vendor code differs for…

 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. 
 So the proprietary Nvidia driver is a large, steaming, smelly pile of shit. At least that’s the impression you get when you read what developers say about it. There’s a bug here and a workaround there, and we haven’t even started talking about the messy…
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. This wouldn’t be so bad, only that the firmware on those dongles can mess up when the device gets a long name. Suddenly it won’t let you connect to…
Update: There are now easier ways to manage this, for example through Lutris. If you manage your WINEs in Lutris, you simply have a checkbox whether to include dumbxinputemu or not. 
 If you need to use WINE to play some Windows games, the lack of Xinput support might get on your nerves. WINE maps joystick devices to Dinput. That works for some older games, but buttons need to be mapped…
TL;DR (1072 words): The current trend towards closed communications systems like Slack, Facebook and the like can only hurt us as society. An open standard needs to emerge. Who’s volunteering to support things like Matrix and the “new decentralized Internet”? 
 I’m trying to illustrate the newly closed nature of the Internet using team chat and team collaboration as an…
Update: With XMPP slowly dying (at least IMHO), maybe you should consider Matrix instead of XMPP and ignore everything I write below. 
 Google just shut down the last piece of Google Talk, killing XMPP. This means that people using standards-based open and interoperable chat systems can no longer talk to their friends who use Google’s proprietary and closed chat system, Hangouts. For…
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. It will probably also not block other privacy invasions or tracking systems that would benefit Google or its customers. Since Google is the world’s largest advertisement company, that’s quite a few. 
…
Canonical are apparently preparing for an IPO. If that happens, I’m pretty sure Microsoft will grab a good chunk of them and maybe absorb them completely later. 
 While Microsoft has been focusing more on the container side with Docker lately, they have also been cuddling with Ubuntu. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which runs Ubuntu in a cage, is only one of these examples. Observe…
Microsoft yesterday announced Windows 10 S, a cut-down version of Windows 10 for the education market . They plan to make it available to PC makers to sell laptops with, for as little as US$ 200 a pop. “Like a Chromebook, then”, you say? Exactly, like a Chromebook. 
 
 Services as drugs for kids
 # 
 
 This is the start of a new turf war for child mindshare. Like…
Some games happen to have wonderful audio (and music), like Wolfenstein: The New Order. Some games happen not to be available natively for Linux, like… err… also Wolfenstein: The New Order. So we play them with WINE, and sometimes there are slight audio issues. 
 But have no fear: If you get audio crackling in such games (especially if your audio device is not running at 44.1…
For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM . It turns out I was very, very wrong. All you need to install on Debian-like guest systems is the package spice-vdagent . You may have to start the service afterwards: 
 apt-get install spice-vdagent
systemctl start spice-vdagentd
 Again, this goes on the guest system. On the host system…
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! 
 
 This is PaperColor light 
 And this is PaperColor dark 
 
 They have been ported to the Base16 color scheme system. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it doesn’t matter at all. Thanks a lot,…
Update: This issue is largely resolved nowadays because modern desktop environments include configuration tools for libinput and its acceleration profiles. 
 If you have a recent Debian testing release, you might have noticed that your mouse now behaves very differently. For me, I noticed it when my aiming turned wobbly in Quake. Quake has extremely tight controls and shouldn’t feel as…
TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of companies to keep it independent, to fight Google’s increasing browser dominance and to ensure our privacy. We must also let Mozilla know what we expect from them. 
 Read on to hear my reasoning.
I recently found out about the Decentraleyes add-on for Firefox. To understand why Decentraleyes is a good idea and why it can help you protect your privacy, here’s what’s been happening so far: 
 
 Web developers all over the world have started using the same libraries of Free Software code to solve the same common problems. This is good. 
 Web developers thought it would…
Once again, I’m on a rampage to destroy all tearing. But this time not on Nvidia but on Intel. I had this problem on both 4400 and 3000 series Intel chips, but I fixed it with this option for the graphics device in xorg.conf: 
 Option 'TearFree' 'true'
 Thanks, one more time, the Arch Linux wiki .
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://www.rsyslog.com/e/0 ]
Nov 4 06:33:21 mail rsyslogd-2359: action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try…
I recently migrated email providers (several times, actually) and came across the fantastic tool mbsync . It’s included in most GNU/Linux distributions, though sometimes called by its old name, “isync”. 
 mbsync is very powerful, it can not only sync between a remote IMAP server and e.g. a local on-disk mirror that you want to keep so you can back it up, it can also sync…
Nvidia’s proprietary driver is notorious for having a lot of tearing and vsync issues. Even if you use their control panel to enable vsync, more often than not it will have no effect. I’ve seen this on a GTX 560, on a 650 Ti, 660 Ti, 860M. Previously I tried using compton to fix this issue, but compton sometimes makes e.g. video display sluggish or seems to add some delay and irregular…
In 2013, the famous online ad reseller Google shut down their Google Reader service. If you ask me, and I do have an arsehole as well as an opinion, it was to drive people towards their less customizable, not standards-based News product that they can pepper with ads. But there are other RSS clients and news readers, and of all of those I’ve spent almost two years with TinyTinyRSS and now a…
Do you get log entries that look like this? 
 Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd-logind[329]: New session 3264 of user foo.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session opened for user foo by (uid=0)
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting user-1000.slice.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Created slice user-1000.slice.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting…
Before you throw any bricks, know that I’ve been a Jolla supporter from before day one. I had my preorder in there and my money earmarked the moment I knew it wasn’t going to be vaporware. I ran the Swiss Jolla Twitter community for several months even before there was a product and I have a TOHKBD and a Jolla Tablet preordered, as well as a second spare Jolla phone sitting in its…
I’m an seasoned nerd, semi-professional programmer, sort of a gamer, music lover and beer drinker with a weird taste. This is my blog, where I write mostly about technology these days. It’s basically a notebook for some tweaks I would otherwise forget. 
 I used to write about society and culture as well, but the older I get, the less I understand either one of them. 
 
 Contact
 #…
In the last 8 years or so, I’ve regularly looked at the ebook market to figure out if they’ve fixed it yet. In 2015 I can say: no, they haven’t. But there is a new star on the horizon, at least. 
 Let’s start with a harmless example: Out of the five sci-fi ebooks that Kobo recommends for 2014 , they refuse to sell you three. They claim that the books are not available…
For several months, I’ve been using Steffen Brüntjen’s EurKEY keyboard layout. That layout combines a general US feel with special characters for many western European languages. 
 That’s fantastic for programmers. You get easy access to keyboard shortcuts that would otherwise be impossible or in weird locations – try typing Alt-` on a Swiss-German keyboard for example,…
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 desktop metapackage, but for me this package had been missing and one of the symptoms was that only “alsa” and “oss” were shown as…
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. Make sure to make backups of your contacts and calendars before you start, since setting the wrong side to be master can potentially wipe out all your data on the other end (as it should, you fool!)
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. Afterwards you should be able to start fcitx in KDE and you get a new icon in your system tray. Go there to configure your input methods. By default,…
Update: Nowadays, better look into a Matrix homeserver . 
 With Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, many people are turning to alternatives such as Threema or MyEnigma. But these alternatives, while offering better security than WhatsApp, are still based on proprietary technology and controlled by a single company. Also, they have somve privacy issues: 
 
 Threema requires that…
In Switzerland, any registered company is forced by the government to pay a percentage of its income as church tax. This feels like something out of the middle ages, and so political parties in several cantons are now launching an initiative to remove this tax, turning religion more into something private instead of something state-sponsored. 
 The funny thing is: Those who oppose forced…
I’ve had my Jolla phon e for a little over a week now and I’ve completely switched off my Android phone. Time to see how well things are going! 
 Some native applications I had to grab from alternative sources: 
 
 Mitäkuuluu , the WhatsApp client. I got this from OpenRepos.net , a repository of Sailfish and Meego Harmattan apps. 
 Harbour Tethering GUI . I got this…
So you’ve found replacements for all the things you used to get from Google, and you’re ready to delete your account. Nice! Good job. I just did the same thing yesterday: 
 
 Make sure to tick every single box, otherwise they won’t let you go. Also, be sure to download any YouTube clips you may have uploaded. I had a YouTube clip with over half a million views and 3000…
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. 
 Google Chrome has been gaining market share at an alarming rate over the last few years. Whatever Google’s marketing is doing, it’s working, as even people who don’t know how to install a program have installed Google Chrome and are…
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. Funny cat videos. Zefrank. Video game reviews and such. 
 Translations, especially of phrases and sentences. 
 
 The former hole can’t really be plugged. For video game reviews and other…
Google’s Android rules the mobile phone market like some sort of ad-flinging gorilla, and it’s not easy to escape its grasp. On a default Android phone your mouth is firmly pressed against several of Google’s teats: 
 
 Google Play, their app store, which requires a Google account. 
 Gmail 
 Contacts (integrated with Gmail) 
 Google Calendars 
 Google Maps…