You might be surprised to learn that there are programs for running presentations in a terminal. No, I don't mean opening PowerPoint or Impress slides one after the other, as images in a frame-buffered console. I mean presenting slides coded for the terminal, in a terminal. Interesting idea? It…

Alright, so, disclaimer. This will likely be most suited for advanced or at least intermediate level Linux users. If you love NetworkManager, look away now, because we're going to obliterate it from the system. Unless, of course, someone works out how to make NetworkManager use the 'wext' driver.…

My wife has been in the same Scottish Country Dancing group for many years, and back in 2005 she began keeping a record of the dances done at each meeting. She lists a fair bit of information in her "dances done" spreadsheet (screenshot below). She recently asked me "Would it be…

I carry a Garmin Etrex 10 when I go bug-collecting. It's a handheld GPS receiver without many frills, and I only use it to record the latitude and longitude of each of my collecting sites as a waypoint. At the start of a field trip I delete all previous waypoints. When I do this, the trip's…

I've written several BASH scripts that use GNU AWK's printf function to round off decimal numbers. Now I've learned that the rounding is biased, and I need to re-do the scripts. For me the desirable way to round off a decimal is to round up if the bit to be discarded is greater than one half, and…

For those who can't live without screen colour shifting technology such as Redshift or f.lux, myself being one of them, using Wayland did pose the challenge of having these existing tools not working with the Xorg replacement. Thankfully, all is not lost and it is possible even right now. Thanks to…

Eyes hurting at night from the glare of your screen? Perhaps it's even affecting your sleep? Then maybe you should give Redshift a try, a program similar to Twilight on Android and inspired by the likes of f.lux. If you've heard of either Twilight or f.lux, you'll probably know what these sorts of…

If you have a Fitbit fitness device and wish to sync your device using the wireless dongle on your Linux machine, the good news is it is possible with the Bluetooth-based Fitbit devices, thanks to a small Python utility called Galileo. Note: you will need a bit of terminal-foo, but to be honest, I…

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of my personal favourite games of all time. Years ago I would have happily run the game in Linux, but the only real way to do so was through WINE. Thanks to OpenMW, a totally rewritten and open source engine for Morrowind, it is now very much possible to have…

SANITY WARNING: Please don't read this article unless you're a compulsive shell scripter, like me. Seriously. There are some excellent FOSS sequence viewers in the distro repositories, with great GUIs and lots of features. Why would you want to build a less capable viewer that only works in a…