Posts tagged: linux

Today I discovered brightnessctl to adjust the screen brightness on my AwesomeWM machine. Its a command line utility that you can use to adjust the brightness of your screen. A command line interface like this gives you the ability to bind keys with something like [[xbindkeys]] or your window manager configuration.

sudo apt install brightnessctl # or paru -S brightnessctl

Now that you have it installed you can use it to adjust the brightness of your screen, this worked particularly well for my laptop screen, I don’t think this works for monitors, in my experience they are usually controlled by the built in osd.

I’ve never heard of niri, or a scrolling window manager, it looks quite interesting. I think tiling window manager misses out on named sessions and hotkey straight to tmux sessions, Brodi mentions not using tmux right before this segment. Niri looks quite interesting, but looks like it suffers specificity. maybe there are other tools that allow me to jump straight to something like brave, or steam, but I don’t see how I could jump to a specific terminal.

You can unset multiple environment variables at once. I did not know this was a thing, its something that ended up happening organically on a call and asking someone to run unset. They had never done it before and did not know how it works, but did exactly as I said instead of what I meant. I like this handy shortcut doing it in one line rather than each one individually, I will be using this in the future. You might need this for something like running aws cli commands with localstack.

i3lock is a fantastic lockscreen for tiling window managers.

If you are using a tiling window manager within a public space you need to add a lockscreen. I have one machine that I take with me to a public space. Its secure enough that I can leave it, but not secure enough that I want to leave it unlocked. So when I need to leave it behind for the restroom I need to lock it up.

arch wiki

paru -S i3lock # or apt install i3lock

Now that you have i3lock installed lets lock that screen.

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This is a very interesting cli, its so simple. I stumbled accross the gi command awhile back and was like pfft, I dont want to install something for that. Didn’t even realize that you don’t install it, its just http. Their install instructions lead you to putting a curl funtion in your bashrc.

function gi() { curl -sLw \"\\\n\" https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/\$@ ;}

This now has me wondering “What else can build like this?”

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

Using pbpaste for command substitution keeps sensitive or long URLs out of your shell history. Instead of typing git clone https://github.com/user/repo-with-long-name.git, copy the URL to clipboard and run git clone "$(pbpaste)". This prevents the URL from appearing in ~/.bash_history or ~/.zsh_history.

To get pbpaste working on both Xorg and Wayland, add this to your shell config:

if [[ $(command -v wl-copy) ]]; then alias pbcopy='wl-copy' pbpaste() { wl-paste; } elif [[ $(command -v xclip) ]]; then alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard' pbpaste() { xclip -selection clipboard -o; } fi

The function approach (instead of alias) enables command substitution, while the quotes around $(pbpaste) handle spaces and special characters safely.

Now you can use it.

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Today I ran into an interesting question, why am I being asked to configure tzdata while installing npm. Turns out that the aptitude cli has a why command that very handily nails down why you have something installed on a debian based system.

apt install aptitude

Why tzdata #

Now we can query why we need tzdata and see the full chain with the root package being npm.

Today I ran into this interactive prompt on ubuntu while installing node and npm, and I do not want to manually configure this interactively every time I run an install, moreso in docker I do not have the interactive terminal to do so.

Configuring tzdata ------------------ Please select the geographic area in which you live. Subsequent configuration questions will narrow this down by presenting a list of cities, representing the time zones in which they are located. 1. Africa 2. America 3. Antarctica 4. Arctic 5. Asia 6. Atlantic 7. Australia 8. Europe 9. Indian 10. Pacific 11. Etc 12. Legacy Geographic area:

Why tzdata #

Checking aptitude why tzdata it shows that the chain goes back through npm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03KsS09YS4E&t=610s

Today I learned about the basic calculator, bc. At the very end of this video prime uses it to add numbers in vim.

You can start a calculator repl at the command line, by running bc.

Since bc supports standard unix pipes you can easily pipe data from vim into bc and back out using !!bc. All you need is a string of math on the line you want to calculate, go to normal mode and run !!bc to get the answer.

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dust is one of my favorite rust rewrite tools. Its so useful for narrowing down file system bloat and cleaning up some disk space on your nearly full disks. It runs right in your terminal and gives you a nice bar graph on the top directories in use.

This man is responsible for making gaming on linux what it is today. Such a heartfelt story to hear that reviving his dad’s machine was at the core of what drove him to do what he has done for the wider gaming on linux community. Update on your schedule, remove all the tracking and bloatware, this is what drove him to start using linux before making it accessible for his Dad.

But really do update, this is not your 2002 PHP box, things need updated and regular updates help the process.

This is a cool new feature coming to bash, I can’t think of a use case I have out of the gate, but it looks cool. I’m thinking this might be good to keep in the back pocket for something like CI where I don’t have a hightly tuned bashrc file, and I want a dynamic curl request based on some state that exists as a fille.

Red Hat has donated the whole open alternative to docker to the CNCF, the hosts weigh in with thier opinions all being pretty positive as they seem to be a legitimate donation and not dumping crap on open source.

Personally I’ve been running podman exclusively at home since switching to Bazzite in August. I’d like to use buildah in ci. I gave it a try, but was unable to swap out my use of kaniko for buildah, I will get there, but it was not quite as drop in as I wanted.

Damn Glorious Eggrolls is still making gaming on linux better. Of course its containerization that drives everything on linux these days. This is a pretty badass talk. Umu is already running in steam and bazzite. Bazzite gamemode uses this to get a gamescope session running.