How to disable Steam Pop-Up Ads on Startup
I’ve been getting a tad tired of the sales notifications that show up whenever I start Steam on one of my systems. I had disabled this ages ago on my main computer but couldn’t remember where the setting was. Here it is: head over to Steam – Settings – Interface (that’s at the top left corner) and disable the option “notify me about additions or changes…” at the bottom. Another internet mystery has been solved!
read moreHow to avoid Firefox from opening on random desktops on macOS
I’m a Firefox user, have been for years. Updates are happening hard and fast, and as such sometimes – and I guess inevitably – things stop working they way they used to before an update. Did I mention I genuinely and passionately HATE updates? Well one such update recently meant that Firefox no longer opens on the Desktop (space) that I’m on, but 8 spaces over. It never did that before, but now it doesn’t do anything but. Major annoying. Zero explanation as to why that happens. It just does. It’s a...
read moreRemoving a software RAID in Fedora
I’ve been playing with various configurations of my software RAID and thought I’d start again from scratch. The obvious question then was, how would I remove my previous efforts? This seems to be different depending on the distribution, so here’s what worked for me in Fedora 33. I’m assuming here that my RAID is /dev/md1. First we’ll take a look at which drives are currently in use on the existing configuration. We can do that in two ways, either by using mdadm --detail /dev/md1 or read this file: cat...
read moreOneDrive keeps un-deleting files – and how I fixed it (at least on my system)
I just had an annoying issue in which I’ve deleted a large number of files (about 1000 or so, across two folders), and OneDrive kept bringing them back a few seconds later. No matter where I’ve deleted the files (either of my PC’s, my Mac or the cloud), they kept re-appearing. I read a tip on the Microsoft Forum about users with the same issues, so at least I was not alone. Turns out that one computer doesn’t seem to get the message and puts the files back. The trick is to figure out which computer that is, then sign...
read moreHow to search across all files in the current Workspace in Visual Studio Code
CTRL + F will let us find (and replace) text in the current open file. Often we need to drill deeper and find a phrase that’s hidden in another file in the current workspace. We can do this in one of two ways: either, click on the little search icon at the top left, then type a phrase in the box. Or, hit SHIFT + CTRL + F to do the same thing.
read moreUsing OBS Virtual Camera with delayed audio in an external app like Zoom, Skype or Discord
Since version 26 of OBS we have that wonderful built-in Virtual Camera option. This lets us use the OBS video output with external apps that do the streaming for us, like Zoom, Skype and Discord to name a few. Video processing takes a small amount of time, and as a result our audio arrives too early when used directly. To make it look professional we need to add an audio delay There’s currently no built-in way to choose the OBS Audio in our external application, even though OBS itself has the ability to delay the audio and make it...
read moreHow to add a drive to software RAID with mdadm
In my previous article I’ve explained how to setup a software RAID with mdadm. This was a RAID 5 setup with 3 drives, and in this article we’ll take a look how to expand it with a 4th drive, increasing its overall size. Here’s what we’ll do in principle: format the new drivecreate an fd partition on it (Linux auto raid type)add the partition as a sparegrow the array resize the file system Getting the new drive ready Let’s format our new drive first. Let’s assume it’s /dev/sdc for now (you can find out...
read moreSetting up a Software RAID on CentOS and Fedora with mdadm
In this article I’ll explain how to setup a software RAID on Fedora. This will turn any number of attached USB drives into any flavour of RAID without the necessity of a dedicated enclosure. I’m using this setup for internal office data storage with redundancy, together with a Samba share. This works on any Linux distribution, the only difference is the way to install the mdadm package. Here are the steps to make this work in principle: format each drive and add a file systemusing msdos as label and fd as file typecreate a logical...
read moreHow to add the mail command in CentOS and Fedora
I was surprised to find that the mail command doesn’t work out of the box in Fedora, nor in the minimal installation of CentOS 7. Thankfully there’s an easy way to add it by installing the mailx package. yum install mailx That’s not the full story on how to send email from the command line of course, nor is it the only possible way to do so. I might elaborate on these details in a future article. I just wanted to make a note to remind myself of the package name that I keep forgetting. Further Reading...
read moreHow to access files on Linux from Windows 10 with a Samba Share
I like the idea of having a shared drive attached to my always-on Linux system, so that all my computers (Windows and Mac) can access those in a central place. It’s like a NAS without having a NAS box if you know what I mean. The easiest way to accomplish this is by using the Samba Protocol. Essentially we’ll declare a part of our Linux system as a Samba Share, setup credentials in Samba, then let users from other systems access these files. It’s a little complex to get going, but I’ll show you all the relevant steps...
read moreLive on Twitter
I'll carry on escaping from that SPADS training camp in Mexico this morning. Join me for a round of XIII on @YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=_-_EZM… #XIII
