Popped in a DVD on your Linux box and started playing the disc directly, only to encounter weird playback issues such as stuttering, skipping or even flat-out stopping? It's a strange, hard to explain issue, but the fix is often quite simple. I believe this is mostly with encrypted, copy-protected…

I have a script that compiles and sorts museum collection data. One of the data fields is for museum registration codes, and a plain sort doesn't understand that humans expect "KS.99", for example, to come before "KS.100": My script instead uses the magic "-V" option…

A few years ago I acquired an HP Chromebook 11, which I talked about in an article on this site at that time. I talked about how I ran Linux software side-by-side with Chrome OS thanks to the likes of Crouton. Since then, the machine has had some basic use, and rather ironically, used as an offline…

For any Xfce gurus who may have tried to emulate the Unity desktop look, or maybe just wanted to save a bit of screen real estate, this may not be new to you. For anyone else though, here's a tip on this neat functionality. It's no secret that the venerable Xfce desktop is very configurable,…

If you've ever given a slide presentation at a conference, you know the drill. Tell the audio-visual people what session your talk is in, then hand them a USB stick with your PowerPoint on it. The presentation has to be in Microsoft PowerPoint because the one and only laptop plugged into the data…

In part 1 of this article I showed how I used AWK on the command line to work up daily rainfall data for my home town, Ulverstone in Tasmania. I wasn't ready to analyse the data, because there were quite a few missing-data days. Some were part of accumulated-total series, where the rainfall total…

AWK is my tool of choice for processing plain-text data, so when I wanted to look closely at daily rainfall data for my home town, I fired up a terminal. In this two-part article I explain how the rainfall data were beaten into shape, mainly with AWK, so I could do my analysis. The commands shown…

I was preparing a slide presentation and wanted to show a block of random 8-bit bytes, like this: Naturally I didn't just type out that block of text on a slide, which would have taken maybe 10 minutes, or copy and modify some byte-text I found online. Of course not. Instead I spent hours dreaming…

When writing or editing scientific-type text in LibreOffice Writer, I rely a lot on its spellchecker. Unfortunately, the scientific terms I'd like to check aren't in the default dictionaries behind LibreOffice's spellchecking routine. There are two ways out of this dilemma. The first is to deal…

With the recent bombshell that Canonical is quitting the Unity desktop project as well as the overall goals for convergence and returning to GNOME, one can't help but wonder what Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will look like. However, as you will see it is very easy to tweak GNOME to look and feel quite similar…