Linux

Printers are devices straight from hell. Just stating a fact. Despite this unfortunate fact I can’t live without one. Digitization is woefully behind in the country I live in so there’s no way around occasionally having to scan and print stuff. Even if it’s just taxes once a year. A short while ago I bought a new printer/scanner combo because the old one died on me. I spent quite some time researching a good choice and settled on a Brother device because those are, at least in my humble experience, easy to set up on the machines I have. ...

Perhaps you’ve been in this situation before. You have a home server which hosts an bunch of stuff. Possibly in VMs, containers, what have you. You want a way to address these servers from elsewhere so you configure a reverse proxy that routes to each of these based on hostname. Personally, I have Jellyfin, Adguard Home, Uptime Kuma and a few other things deployed on the same machine and wired-up this way. ...

Have you ever had the problem that you want to run a script but because it handles relative paths it depends on the directory it’s called from? Well, today I learned about a shell function that helps with that, called dirname. It can be fed a path and will return it with the last non-slash component and trailing slash removed. So to refer to the location a script sits in you can do simply: ...

A while ago I became aware of Nix, NixOS and people who actually use it. I was intrigued by the proposition: configure your whole system declaratively so you can avoid configuration drift and combat issues with reproducibility. I tried it out and found that Nix is not straightforward to learn. Also, the documentation is gruesome. I decided that knowing Nix and applying it might be nice but I just don’t want to learn it right now. ...

“Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! Reason enough to dust it off and play it yet again. This time I went to hunt for mods to make it more interesting this time around and I found JKHub. This has a list of recommended mods for the game here featuring cosmetic ones, new textures, new lightsabers, new character models but also conversion mods, new missions and more! But first things first: installation. I own the GOG version of the game so I used Lutris to install the game with this script. It makes use of OpenJK, an open-source reimplementation of the game engine which also has a Linux build so you can now play this game natively on Linux! What a time to be alive! ...