My Linux laptop used to suspend perfectly. I'd close the lid and it would go to sleep. Open it up, it would spring to life - presenting me with a password screen. But, some time in the last few months, it has stopped doing that. If I close the lid, it keeps running. This is unhelpful. If I manually run the suspend command - systemctl suspend - the laptop blanks the screen then immediately turns it back on at the lock screen. It doesn't suspend. I know that suspend physically works - becasue running any of these other command does properly suspend the machine. But powering it back up goes strai ..read more

The Mozilla VPN service is great, but it doesn't work using the CLI if you have a "headless" server. After a bit of faffing about, I got it working. I suffered so you don't have to. Get an account Sign up and use code MOZILLA20 for a cheeky 20% discount! Get a token in the browser To start with, you'll need to get an authentication token. This requires you to be on a machine which can run a modern browser like Firefox or Chrome. On a computer with a GUI, download MozWire. This is an unofficial way to download the necessary WireGuard config files. Open up a terminal and make it executable: chm ..read more

(Mostly notes to myself.) If you have a lot of images in a directory, and want to quickly make an image montage, here's how to do it on Linux using ImageMagick. First up, this command finds all JPG file, then resizes them so they fit in a maximum box of 256x256, then sets the quality to 75%, then saves them as JPGs: find ./ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -exec mogrify -verbose -format jpg -layers Dispose -resize 256\>x256\> -quality 75% {} + This will overwrite your existing files so make sure you have a backup. This will take all JPG files, and then arrange them in a montage which is 10 images ..read more

How do you quickly insert a ? emoji when using your laptop? I just type ScrLck, p, o, o! What is this ?‍♀️ craft? In your keyboard settings, you should see an option like this: You can set the "Compose" key to be anything you like. Personally, I use the otherwise-useless Scroll Lock button. Now, once you press ScrLck you'll see this symbol . The next few letters you type will be "absorbed" by that symbol and combined to make something new. What's available You can see the default symbols in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose You can add your own, either in the file or in ~/.XCompose N ..read more

I'm an idiot. I ran a new version of Firefox nightly without creating a new profile. When I went to run my regular Firfox, I got this error message: Here's how I fixed it. Close down Firefox Open a terminal and run: firefox --allow-downgrade Let Firefox start up and create a new profile. Then go to: about:profiles You'll see something like this: Select "Set as default profile" and click through any warnings Close Firefox. Once again, run firefox --allow-downgrade That should do it! Next time you start Firefox normally, everything should be fine. Probably. In the future, make backups of you ..read more

After my rant the other day about Adobe Digital Editions, I discovered libgourou by Grégory Soutadé libgourou is a free implementation of Adobe's ADEPT protocol used to add DRM on ePub files. It overcome the lacks of Adobe support for Linux platforms. There are a few limitations, but nothing too serious: Only ePub is supported. No PDF Command line only Alpha quality software. It works - but is a bit finickity You can compile the code yourself, but I just downloaded the pre-built binaries. On Ubuntu / Pop I needed to sudo apt install libzip-dev. Once you've unzipped the download, cd into it ..read more

Back to the office! The only thing which makes other people bearable is being able to block out their chatter (sorry colleagues, I love you all dearly!). So I picked up this pair of on-ear Bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelation. They're pricey (a bit under £200) but are they any good? First impressions Not great. None of the buttons are labelled, so it's surprisingly hard to figure out how to turn it on and start pairing. It isn't either of the two large, prominent buttons, but one one off the smaller, flush buttons. No, not that one, the other one. *sigh* It announces that it has ..read more

Mobile phones have been one of the greatest drivers of functional enhancements for computing interfaces. I use the clipboard history feature on Android multiple times per day. Rather than copy one item, then paste it, then switch back, then copy another, then switch back etc - I just copy two items, switch app, and paste them where I want. For some reason, I never considered doing that on Linux - until now! Clipboard Indicator is a handy little Gnome extension. It sits on your dock monitoring your clipboard. Click the icon and get a list of what you've copied. They're keyboard and mouse selec ..read more

All the Cool Kids™ use emoji. On Android, they're usually built right in to the keyboard. But that's not the case on desktops and laptops. Well, unless you build a dedicated emoji keyboard. So I was delighted to find this brilliant little Gnome Extension called Emoji Selector. It sits in your dash, until you click it or press ?+e. Then you get this pop up. The search bar focuses as soon as you open it, and the results are keyboard selectable. There's the usual groupings of emoji, if you just want to scroll. Click the emoji you want and it copies to your clipboard, ready to be pasted in. And ..read more

One of the annoying things about being on the bleeding edge, is that some things don't work as you expect. I use the Wayland Display Server on my Linux box. And I couldn't find a simple screen recorder which worked. Turns out, Gnome has a hidden screen recorder! To activate it, press these keys simultaneously. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT ⇪+R A small circle icon will appear in your tray to show it is recording. By default, the recordings last 30 seconds, and are saved as a WebM in the ~/Videos directory. If you want to stop the screen recording, just hit the same keys again. Limitations This is basic. I mea ..read more