Category Archives: Linux

Speeding Up Emacs and Parsing Emacs Lisp from Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2013-04-13 by

I recently spent a bit of time to clean up all the cruft that my ~/.emacs file and my ~/elisp directory had accumulated. I have been using a multi-file setup to configure my Emacs sessions, since at least 2008. This … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Emacs, Free software, GNU/Linux, Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Saving Space in Rsnapshot Archives with Hardlinks

Posted on 2013-04-03 by

The hardlink package is quite handy on Linux systems. It appears to do a nice job saving disk space in my local rsnapshot archives (25 GB reported as “saved” after today’s run on a week of daily snapshots). The stress … Continue reading →

Posted in Backup, Computers, Free software, GNU/Linux, laptop, Linux, Open source, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Controlling the Keyboard Backlight from CLI

Posted on 2013-03-28 by

I found out today how to query and set the state of the keyboard backlight of my Asus Zenbook laptop through dbus-send calls, so I instantly thought “hey this would be nice to have in a shell script”. So I … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNU/Linux, laptop, Linux, Open source, Zenbook | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fixing Shifted-Arrow Keys in 256-Color Terminals on Linux

Posted on 2013-03-22 by

The terminfo entry for “xterm-256color” that ships by default as part of ncurses-base on Debian Linux and its derivatives is a bit annoying. In particular, shifted up-arrow key presses work fine in some programs, but fail in others. It’s a … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mate desktop support for xdg-open (tiny patch)

Posted on 2013-03-18 by

The Mate desktop really lives up to its promise of a “traditional desktop”, compatible in look and feel with Gnome 2.X versions. After running it for a few hours now, I’m sold. I never really liked Unity very much, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Linux, MATE desktop, Open source, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Mutt-like Scrolling for Gnus

Posted on 2013-03-11 by

Mutt scrolls the index of email folders up or down, one line at a time, with the press of a single key: ‘<’ or ‘>’. This is a very convenient way to skim through email folder listings, so I wrote … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Programming, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux, Gnus, Email | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Awesome WM in Ubuntu 12.04

Posted on 2012-10-18 by

I’ve been using awesome and other tiling window managers for a while now. I find it more comfortable when programs are using as much screen space as possible, and I like organizing my open windows in “workspaces” instead of having … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Linux, Open source, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Concatenating Video Files with MPlayer

Posted on 2011-05-20 by

I found out how to concatenate the parts of a video to a single file with MPlayer. It’s relatively easy, so this is just a mini-post to save it for posterity: $ cat video_part1.avi video_part2.avi … > temp.avi $ mencoder … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, FreeBSD, Linux, Open source, Software | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

sudo hints and ~/.hushlogin in debian or ubuntu

Posted on 2010-11-08 by

My work laptop runs Ubuntu Linux. After using Ubuntu for more than a month now, I can definitely agree that it is a really nice Linux distribution. Most of the things I have to do as part of my every-day … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, GNU/Linux, laptop, Linux, Open source, Programming, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged | 8 Comments

Unit Testing Uncovers Bugs

Posted on 2010-03-09 by

As part of the ‘utility’ library in one of the projects we are using at work, I wrote two small wrappers around strtol() and strtoul(). These two functions support a much more useful error reporting mechanism than the plain atoi() … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Linux, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , | 13 Comments