intel won’t allow its linux drivers to work above wifi 4 speeds in ap mode, so i created a kvm virtual windows machine with pci pass through on the wifi nic plus ip masquerade and now i’m getting wifi 6 speeds in ap mode.

I like to use unclutter to hide my mouse pointer after a few seconds without being moved.

Now, the thing is, it doesn’t just visually hide the cursor, it actually removes it, so UI elements triggered by hovering disappear. Sometimes that’s great, other times it’s infurriating, like when reading a tooltip or menu.

I mostly use a touchpad, and so I developed a habit to wiggle my finger while I’m intentionally hovering something, so that there was enough mouse movement for unclutter to not remove my pointer.

Then I found a setting for the jitter threshold of the touchpad. Basically, with the threshold on, it ignores tiny movements, because the hardware reports finger wiggling, even if you hold your finger perfectly still. Which is perfect for me to turn off.

Now when I have my finger on the touchpad, it automatically wiggles and allows me to read hover elements. If I take my finger off, it stops wiggling and removes the cursor.
It’s almost like someone designed an OS with touchpads in mind, rather than them being an afterthought.

This certainly isn’t of the same caliber as some of these other comments, but I found it to be fitting to the topic.

Last year I was having problems getting the game stellaris working on arch. (I use bazzite now, btw) My solution was the following:

1. download the game via steam.
2. switch it to use proton
3. switch it back to linux version
4. use the terminal to make the entire game folder read-only, so that steam couldn’t touch the game anymore and screw it up.
5. add the exicutable to PATH
6. start the game via terminal

If any one of those step was left out, it didn’t work. I’m no linux expert, so I didn’t have the skills to actuality find the real problem.

I duct taped a Raspberry Pi to the back of a television once. Does that count?

I have an old laptop running some basic services.

I have taken it apart before to replace the hard drive with an SSD, but I never replaced the dead CMOS battery because you have to literally completely disassemble it to get at the battery.

So I have a cronjob that runs on startup to change the system clock to the right time-zone.

I had to use unity game engine for one of my assignments for school, but unity wouldn’t generate files needed for the language server unless I set the code editor to vscode. I fixed this by creating a bash script with the path /usr/bin/code that opens neovim in konsole.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
konsole -e "nvim $@"

I have a folder full of scripts tied to aliases that fix various things when they go wonky, and I’ve long since forgotten what any of them do. I just know if xxx app stops working, I type fix_xxx into the terminal and then it does a bunch of stuff and then it works again lol.

Also I have a bunch of aliases tied to common tasks, like e1 = reboot, e2 = shutdown etc. I have no idea where that habit came from.

Edit: ALSO, just the general mish-mash of apps. I won’t have anything to do with Snaps, but the rest of it is an unholy combination of native apps, things from the AUR, flatpaks, Appimages, Docker containers and wine setups, mostly (but not all) in Bottles.

I’m using Gentoo with systemd and a customized kernel, and additionally I have the /usr partition LUKS encrypted. Because /usr is absolutely essential for systemd to function, I configured dracut to make a specially crafted initrd which activates the luks lvm and prompts for the password to decrypt and mount /usr on startup before systemd init tries to run.

About a year or two ago, some update to dracut or some other dependency (assumption) caused the dracut generated initrd’s to kernel panic. After multiple days of troubleshooting, I discovered that just copying forward an older initrd in /boot and naming it to match the new kernel, e.g. initramfs-6.6.38-gentoo.img , allows the system to boot normally .

So, my Gentoo is booting a kernel 6.6.something with a ramdisk generated in the 5.9 kernel era. I am dreading the day when this behavior breaks and I can no longer update my kernel 😳

BZ2-ing up a terabyte of zeroes (back when a TB was more than people commonly had, then zipping that file up together with another file, to bypass virus scanners in emails that prevent emailing .exe files.

I’ve also seen a self-referential .zip file somewhere that contains itself.

Had a Centos VM that kept slipping time. Every week it would loose about 30min. No amount of NTP syncing got the time correct until manual intervention.
Msp couldn’t work it out, couldn’t rebuild the server for infrastructure reasons, and only that server had the issue. The other 3 VMs on that host were fine.

Cron job on one server took it current time, sshed to the dodgy server and configured the correct time.

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

An old (now decommissioned) notebook of mine had a broken headphone jack. I didn’t have BT headphones then. Audio output worked technically but the detection whether headphones were plugged in or not did no longer work.

I wrote a very short amixer script to force unmute the jack, set the volume to 50 or so percent and set the speaker volume to 0% but not “mute” state. I could then use my wired headphones again.

On my previous laptop, the trackpad had a bug that made it spam interrupts after waking up from sleep. It ruined battery life and basically kept one core at 100% permanently.

So I duct-taped a systemd script that unbound and bound the trackpad after each wake up.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
        post)
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/unbind
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/bind
        ;;
esac

Some years ago, I had a client with a really fucked up set of requirements:

• Must run Gentoo Linux. (No, I don’t know why. But it was written into the project specs and everybody who had to sign off did.)
• Must use LUKS for FDE.
• Login (loosely interpreted as “booting up”) must have MFA.

This was during the days when booting into a LUKS encrypted Gentoo install involved copy-and-pasting a shell script out of the Gentoo wiki and adding it to the initrd. I want to say late 2006 or early 2007.

I remember creating a /boot partition, a tiny little LUKS partition (512 megs, at most) after it, and the rest of the drive was the LUKS encrypted root partition. The encrypted root partition had a randomly generated keyfile as its unlocker; it was symmetrically encrypted using gnupg and a passphrase before being stored in the tiny partition. The tiny partition had a passphrase to unlock it. gnupg was in the initrd. I think the workflow went something like this:

• System boots up.
• Script in the initrd prompted the user for the passphrase for the tiny LUKS partition. (first authentication step)
• User entered passphrase.
• Script in the initrd unlocked the tiny partition and prompted the user for the passphrase to decrypt the root partition’s keyfile stored therein.
• User entered the symmetric passphrase for keyfile. (second authentication step_
• Script used the passphrase to decrypt the keyfile to stdout, piped into an evocation of cryptsetup to unlock the root partition.
• /dev/mapper/root mounted, /boot mounted, boot process continued.
• User logged into the box.

I don’t miss those days.

sssd didn’t work well with my company’s AD server, which would cause repeated authentication failures until I restarted sssd. I rigged up a bash script which would restart sssd any time xscreensaver logged an auth fail.