Quick - Dave Jansen

Quick: Use badblocks to check larger hard drives (8TB+)

Checking newly purchased hard drives can be a smart move, especially before adding them to a pool. While this does not guarantee there won't be any issues, it might help catch some before they could potentially cause for a headache day. I recently purchased two additional drives in preparation for

Linux

Using a Logitech StreamCam on Linux

Last week I finally purchased a webcam for online meetings, something I had been holding off on for quite some time. I was using a 12" MacBook for these up until now, but I wanted to get a webcam for my main computer as I sometimes need to look over

Linux

Quick: How to fix screen tearing in Ubuntu with AMD GPUs and X11

Every now and then you run into a little oddity that reminds you you're running Linux. Something that you really shouldn't even have to think about, but somehow lacks any GUI configuration, and is tucked away behind a config file you have to create yourself. This feels especially noticeable because

Hackintosh

Install macOS Big Sur 10.0.1 public release in a VM (QEMU)

This is a small addendum to my main article on how to install macOS in a VM, which I'll keep as-is as that's effectively the normal way. But, if you'd like to jump on the fresh-off-the-press public release of Big Sur, here's what you have to do to make that

Linux

Increase thumbnail cache in Ubuntu

You might have noticed that with the thumbnail view enabled in Ubuntu (or, the Nautilus file browser) that thumbnails seem to have to be re-generated quite frequently. This is due to the cache size limit being set quite small by default, at just 512mb. This quick guide is to show

Development

Audit & Fix your NPM packages when using Yarn

Yarn is a nice alternative to NPM, with pretty much feature parity and, depending on the version, some speed benefits too, though these days perhaps slightly less so as compared to a few years ago. While there's pretty much feature parity, there's one area where Yarn is missing one somewhat

Linux

Install a Linux kernel of choice under Ubuntu.

Checking this one off of the "did not expect I'd ever have to figure this one out" list. Here's a quick guide on how to install a Linux kernel version of choice under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Alternative title: Fix amdgpu issues and related system stability woes with your Radeon

Quick

Quick: Give full filesystem access to Flatpak-installed applications

When installing applications using Flatpak you'll sooner or later run into a situation where the default filesystem access permissions the application has been given can get in the way. Sometimes you just want to use applications like Handbrake or MusicBrainz Picard with files located outside of your home folder. For

Linux

Enable Korean input on Ubuntu 19.10 & 20.04

Here's of those things that are on the surface straight-forward but in practice require a few steps that might not be easy to remember for future (re-)installs. Here are the steps needed to get Korean input working under Ubuntu 19.10, 20.04 and presumably 19.04 too. Installing

Quick

My Recommended Firefox Settings

A bit of a minor post today. I have been meaning to write down my preferred settings for Firefox as its defaults leave a lot to be desired. This is unfortunate actually, as it might throw someone off if their first impression is less good because of this. Firefox is

Quick

Quick: How to dump & restore a MariaDB/MySQL database from a docker container

In the same vein as my previous post on dumping and restoring your PostgreSQL database, here are mostly copy/paste-able commands for when you're using a MariaDB or MySQL database. Check out this quickie here if you're using PostgreSQL.While the following commands have "mysql" in their name, they're actually

Quick

Quick: Taming Photos.app when using iCloud Photos

Anyone who uses iCloud photos and has syncing turned on on your Mac or Hackintosh will likely one day run into challenges with it. Whether it's the uncontrollable hard drive usage or the incessant background processes that occasionally take over your entire CPU, it's just not ideal and can really

Quick

Quick: How to dump & restore a PostgreSQL database from a docker container

Sometimes you need to quickly dump and restore a PostgreSQL database, but what's the easiest way to do this when your database is in a Docker container? Check out this quickie here if you're using MariaDB or MySQL.2021-04-07: Updated the guide with a more up-to-date method for sending a

Quick

Quick: dd with progress indication on macOS

While newer versions of dd on Ubuntu or the like come with a new option called status=progress, the one included with macOS sadly does not. A nice way I found to get progress indication whilst still being able to benefit from the huge speed increase in using /dev/rdiskX

Hackintosh

Quick: Enabling TRIM support on your Hackintosh

As you may or may not know, TRIM support is not enabled by default on macOS on any SSD not provided by Apple directly. This is done because not all manufacturers follow the standards, and often just test for compatibility with Windows. Fortunately though, enabling TRIM support is easy enough,

Quick

Guide: How to run Steam when your macOS drive is case-sensitive

Unfortunately companies like Steam and Adobe have still opted not to properly update their apps to be compatible with case-sensitive file systems, so if you have opted to choose this when setting up your Mac or Hack, when you get to wanting to install Steam you'll run into issues. Fortunately

Quick

Quick: Docker Credential Helper

Or; not storing your password in plaintext, because duh. This one got me by surprise; if you log in to something like Docker Hub or so using Docker, by default it stores your password in plaintext. Yikes? Fortunately there's a solution, but it still surprises me that you have to

Quick

Quick: Monitoring your computer's temperatures in Ubuntu 18.10

After recently re-applying better thermal paste for the GPD Pocket 2, I wanted to also be able to keep an eye on system temperatures while running Ubuntu. Fortunately there is a pretty easy app for that, that you can use regardless of what machine you're running Ubuntu on. This application

Quick

Quick: Unzip multiple files with spaces in their filenames using command line.

You might have run into a similar situation; You need to unzip several ZIP files, but running unzip *.zip command results in errors shown about files not being found. Joy. Fortunately there's way to avoid this. Unfortunately, it's not something you can easily memorize. Or, I certainly cannot. Credit is

Quick

Quick: How to get your full CPU info in macOS

Because I keep forgetting how to do this myself, too, here's an easy command that reports back your CPU's info: sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_stringThis will return a string looking something like this (taken from my Hackintosh): Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHzOr for a Macbook 12"

Homelab

Proxmox VE 5.3

The new version of Proxmox was released a few days ago, and brings several very nice new features with it. For me the most interesting is that they've added PCI passthrough support in the Web UI (you'd have to manually edit your VM configuration files previously), but there's several other

Homelab

Server Padding

Due to part luck and part perseverance from a colleague I somewhat quickly ended up with several servers. My original plan was to purchase just the one, but these things have a way of going in different routes, so four(-ish) servers later, I now have a small stack of