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.

My mother uses some software that runs in the browser for her shop. It can print out receipts and scan items. To do these things it has a small “sattelite” application that runs on the system and interacts with the printer and scanner. This software only runs on Windows and Linux doesn’t have drivers for the scanner.

When I switched her over to Linux and found this out in the process I wanted to stop, give up and install windows.

But then I had a stupid idea. I could run the sattelite program in a Windows VM and pass through the USB devices for receipt printer and scanner. The webapp uses requests to localhost:9998 to communicate with the sattelite so I set up a apache server that proxies these requests into the VM. I also prevented the VM from acessing the Interner so Windows doesn’t update and screw everything up.

And it works. It has been in use for a week now and I’ve heard no complaints. I’m just praying to god it doesn’t break

My control key was broken, but I found that when I used an app and held down the space bar key, the CPU would get abnormally hot.

So I wrote an Emacs interrupt to interpret a rapid CPU rise as “press the control button”.

Unfortunately the dev pushed an update that broke space bar heating, which broke my workflow. I opened a bug report about it, though…

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 think this one beats them all.

My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn’t even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn’t expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won’t work anymore.

The solution?

• My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
• Because I don’t want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
• When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
• On the server, there’s a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

I’ve been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.

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.

It just felt simpler than completely disassembling a hard-to-take-apart laptop.

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.

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 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’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.

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.

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.