Firefox: Stop that nagging on available updates

After upgrading to Firefox 72.0.1 on Linux, I got a tab encouraging me to upgrade Firefox (and that it couldn’t be done automatically). To make things worse, the option to turn off automatic upgrades checks has been removed from the GUI interface. Why? Call it what you want, at the bottom there’s a “let’s force [...]

Octave: Empty plots (after “figure”)

Running Octave 4.2.2 on Linux Mint 19, I got plots with nothing in them occasionally. Solution: Change the graphics toolkit to GNU Plot. Simply put, add ~/.octaverc reading graphics_toolkit(“gnuplot”) and rerun Octave. By the way, for zooming in, right-click the mouse on the first point, and left-click on the second.

The ultimate C printf debug line

The simplest way to add printf statements that say “I was here”: printf(“File %s, Line %d\n”, __FILE__, __LINE__); The output is then simply e.g. File bulktest.c, Line 120 So make sure everything is committed into the git repo, and bombard the code with these lines. Compile and run. The is also __func__ (lowercase, or it [...]

Add-on icons vanished after Firefox upgrade

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t upgrade Firefox. It upgraded itself suddenly into Firefox 68.o Quantum. How did I notice? Not because it became any better, but because suddenly things stopped working. And I got logged out from several sites. For example, my Adblocker and other add-on suddenly vanished. Checking the add-on settings, the relevant [...]

KiCad PCB layout: Adapting the footprint’s pads to match track width

Introduction It just so happened that I went for a pair of 0.8mm thick wires, with 0.2mm between them, in order to achieve 90Ω differential impedance on a 1 mm thick FR4 board. No wonder PCBnew (KiCad’s layout program) refused connecting these wires to a USB SuperSpeed receptacle’s footprint, with its 0.4 mm side pads, [...]

Linux / X-Windows: Which process owns this window?

Once in a while, there’s a piece of junk on the desktop, and the question is who should be blamed for it. The short answer is: $ xwininfo and fetch the window’s ID from the line at the beginning saying e.g. xwininfo: Window id: 0x860000a “xclock” And next, fetch the alleged process ID: $ xprop [...]

Making a snapstot of a full Ubuntu / Mint repository on the local disk

What’s that good for? This isn’t about maintaining a local repository that mirrors its original, following along with its changes. The idea is to avoid the upgrades of a lot of packages every time I want to install a new one with apt. Maybe I should mention that I don’t allow automatic upgrades on my [...]

apt / dpkg: Ignore error in post-install script

You have been warned This post shows how to cripple the installation of a Debian package, and make the system think it went through OK. This might very well bring your system’s behavior towards the exotic, unless you know perfectly what you’re doing. In some few cases, like the one shown below, it might actually [...]

ImageMagick convert to scale jpgs + failing to crop correctly?

Instead of using my scanner, I put my cell phone on some kind of stand, and shot a lot of paper documents (voice activation is a blessing). But then the files are unnecessarily large. Don’t need all that resolution. So $ for i in * ; do convert “$i” -scale ’33%’ -quality 75 “smaller/scan_$i” ; [...]

When mplayer plays a black window (or: Cinnamon leaking GPU memory)

The incident All of the sudden, playing videos with Mplayer opened a black window. Sometimes going fullscreen helped, sometimes it didn’t, sometimes with video playing but without OSD. ffplay worked, but somewhat limping. Setting: Linux Mint 19 on an x86_64, with a couple of fanless GeForce GT 1030 graphics cards and Cinnamon 3.8.9. Mplayer’s output [...]