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bash timestamp

Today I needed to make a backup of some config. I wanted to add a timestamp so that I knew when the backup was made. This would make unique backups easy, and I could tell when they were made. If you want to decrypt the timestamp into something more human readable. You can list backup files, strip out the timestamp, and then convert it to a human readable date. or just throw it to the date command by hand.

Dolphin Remote Storage Previews

I've got a few samba shares going in my homelab, and I'm struggling finding a great app to scroll through vacation photos with my wife. I want something intuitive, non intimidating, and just works. Turns out that the default file browser application for hyprland works great, but you need to enable previews for remote storage for it to work for my use case here. 3940267e-3727-4e7b-8f7f-aebb49d79326.png

fc

I am a linux user through and through. Desktop, server, vms, containers, everything except my phone is linux. With this I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and have been a long time user of to rerun the last command, but with the ability to tack something on at the beginning or end. TIL about , which opens the last command in your shell history in your or pass in your editor . man fc Rcap of how !! works pronounces and will run the last command in your history. enters the chat Now

tmux clipboard on hyprland

Smooth clipboard settings for tmux is critical for my workflow. I'm often grabbing snippets of terminal output to paste into team chats, blog posts, or llm prompts. Admittedly, I'm often doing this with the mouse, unless it's coming from neovim, which I generally do with motions. Moving from an based setup to hyprland has required me to reconfigure my tmux clipboard settings. This is what I did. First install wl-clipboard with paru. Next add this to your tmux config. I've long had this con

brightnessctl adjust screen brightness

Today I discovered to adjust the screen brightness on my AwesomeWM machine. Its a command line utility that you can use to adjust the brightness of your screen. A command line interface like this gives you the ability to bind keys with something like [[xbindkeys]] or your window manager configuration. Now that you have it installed you can use it to adjust the brightness of your screen, this worked particularly well for my laptop screen, I don't think this works for monitors, in my experienc

unset multiple environment variables

You can unset multiple environment variables at once. I did not know this was a thing, its something that ended up happening organically on a call and asking someone to run . They had never done it before and did not know how it works, but did exactly as I said instead of what I meant. I like this handy shortcut doing it in one line rather than each one individually, I will be using this in the future. You might need this for something like [[running-aws-cli-commands-with-localstack]].

i3lock on AwesomeWM

is a fantastic lockscreen for tiling window managers. If you are using a tiling window manager within a public space you need to add a lockscreen. I have one machine that I take with me to a public space. Its secure enough that I can leave it, but not secure enough that I want to leave it unlocked. So when I need to leave it behind for the restroom I need to lock it up. arch wiki Now that you have installed lets lock that screen. You can use your window manager or something more generic lik

aptitude why

Today I ran into an interesting question, why am I being asked to configure tzdata while installing npm. Turns out that the cli has a why command that very handily nails down why you have something installed on a debian based system. Install aptitude Why tzdata Now we can query why we need tzdata and see the full chain with the root package being .

configure timezone

Today I ran into this interactive prompt on ubuntu while installing node and npm, and I do not want to manually configure this interactively every time I run an install, moreso in docker I do not have the interactive terminal to do so. Why tzdata Checking aptitude why tzdata it shows that the chain goes back through npm. The solution, configure tzdata !!! TIP DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive This is required, because apt installing tzdata will trigger the interactive prompt. You will manually con

bc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03KsS09YS4E&t=610s Today I learned about the basic calculator, bc. At the very end of this video prime uses it to add numbers in vim. REPL You can start a calculator repl at the command line, by running bc. Vim Since bc supports standard unix pipes you can easily pipe data from vim into bc and back out using . All you need is a string of math on the line you want to calculate, go to normal mode and run to get the answer. Traditionally I will open my system ca

arch remove orphaned packages

playerctl fixes arch media keys

I've long had issues with my qmk keyboard media keys on my arch install, I always thought it was on the keyboard end. Today I learned that playerctl fixes this. Once it is installed all of my media keys started working right away. I played around with it a bit more and came up with a way to display the current playing title in my notifictations.

tailscale ssh

Tailscale allows you to ssh into all of your tailscale machines, it busts through firewalls and accross networks without complex setup. If you have used tailscale before this is an obvious no brainer. What is not obvious is that you can configure tailscale to allow ssh connections from devices within your tailnet without even a ssh daemon process running right through the tailscale daemon. I picked this up from the tailscale youtube channel. Tailscale {.youtube-embed}

just picker

has been by go to tool for saving commands in a way that I can replay them and have team members replay them without relying on the shell history of any given machine. This is my go to default step, it lets you pick a just command to run with a fuzzy picker.

showmount-e

TIL how to display the list of nfs mounts on your network. You can even look for mounts of other machines on your network.

Redka Runs on SQLite

With the liscense changes to redis there are several new forks out there. One that I am particularly interested in is redka . We now have redis running on port 6379 that we can connect to with a redis client. And we have a sqlite database that we can inspect. We can look at the values in the vstring table.

Am I vulnerable to the xz backdoor?

The main system that I am concerned about is my arch BTW machine. I found a great article from the official archlinux site covering it. For my machine I am concerned with this line. The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor. I checked my xz package with paru, and I am good.

arch dependencies

paru has some nice features that I rarely use, and hav to look up when I need them. Here are two commands to help with dependency management. You can check all the packages depended on by nodejs by running the following. This is everything from all of the repos you have configured, not what you have installed.

How to kill ollama server

I recently updated ollama , and it now installs a systemd service that I was not expecting. Seems like a great option, but I hadn't expeted this and I was able to kill it previously. It was using up gpu, and I do other things on my machine with a gpu. I tried pkill, kill, and everything, it was still coming back. No matter what it comes back You can confirm this with the following command. Next time you want to start you can do it as before with .

setting up paru | installing from the AUR for the ...

paru is an aur helper that allows you to use a package manager to install packages from the aur. What's the Aur The Aur is a set of community managed packages that can be installed on arch based distros. Why a helper? paru just makes it easy, no clone and run makepkg. You can do everything paru can do using the built in pacman installer. Manual Install from the Aur You will need to manually instal pacman from the aur in order to get started. Installing packages with paru Once setup you are ready

Arch Linux Randomly Rejecting Passwords

Fix Arch Linux randomly rejecting passwords with one command. Try 'faillock --user $USER' to reset login counter and regain access. Quick solution for a smooth computing" an intertwined mess of wires If you're an Arch Linux user, you may have experienced a frustrating issue where your password is randomly not being accepted by the system. This can be a major inconvenience and can cause a lot of frustration, especially if it happens frequently. The good news is that there is a simple fix for this

ssh copy id

I recently setup some vm's on my main machine and got sick of signing in with passwords.

ssh key permissions

I just shared some ssh keys with myself and ran into this error telling me that I did not set the correct permissions on my key. I changed them with the following commands.

obs virtual camera on boot

For far too long I have had to fidget with v4l2oloopback after reboot. I've had this happen on ubuntu 18.04, 22.04, and arch. After a reboot the start virtual camera button won't work, It appears and is clickable, but never turns on. Until I run this command. "cell shaded, long, full body, shot of a cybernetic blue soldier with glowing pink eyes looking into a selfie camera with ring light, llustration, post grunge, 4 k, warm colors, cinematic dramatic atmosphere, sharp focus, pink glowing vol

arch Fonts

https://gist.github.com/YoEight/d19112db56cd8f93835bf2d009d617f7

Manage your displays with xrandr manager

a stable diffusion done with a111 web ui xrandr is a great cli to manage your windows in a linux distro using x11, which is most of them. The issue is that I can never remember all the flags to the command, and if you are using it with something like a laptop using a dock the names of all the displays tend to change every time you redock. This makes it really hard to make scripts that work right every time. Homepage Check out the deresmos/xrandr-manager for more details on it. installation xran

qutebrowser clean up all status bars

I really like the super clean look of no status menus, no url bar, no bookmarks bar, nothing. Don't get me wrong these things are useful, but honestly they take up screen real estate and I RARELY look at them. What I really want is a toggle hotkey. I found this one from one of DT's youtube video's. I can now tap and both the status bar at the botton and the address bar at the top disappear.

A TTY Can Save Your Bacon

I recently was unable to boot into my home Linux Desktop, it got stuck at diskcheck . I found that I was able to get in to a tty through a hotkey. https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1512281106120384519 What's a TTY? There's probably more to it, but to me its a full screen terminal with zero gui, not even your gui fonts. It does log into your default shell so if you have a comfy command line setup it will be here for you even though it looks much different without fonts and full colorspa

Dunk is my new diff pager

Dunk is a beautiful git diff tool built on top of rich . Browsing through twitter the other day I discovered it through this tweet by _darrenburns . https://twitter.com/_darrenburns/status/1510350016623394817 {.hoverlink} Dunk is beta Before I dive in deep, I do want to mention that Dunk is super new and beta at this point. I am making it my default pager, because I know what I am doing and can quickly shift back if I need to, no sweat. If you are a little less comfortable with the command

Unzip minecraft mods to their directory from the c...

This morning I was trying to install a modpack on my minecraft server after getting a zip file, and its quite painful when I unzip everything in the current directory rather than the directory it belongs in. I had the files on a Windows Machine So I've been struggling to get mods installed on linux lately and the easiest way to download the entire pack rather than each mod one by one seems to be to use the overwolf application on windows. Once I have the modpack I can start myself a small mod-s

Create a Swapfile on Your Linux Machine

If you ever end up on a linux machine that just does not have enough ram to suffice what you are doing and you just need to get the job done you can give it some more swap. You can look up reccomendations for how much swap you should have this is more about just trying to get your job done when you are almost there, but running out of memory on the hardware you have. make the /swap file You can put this where you wish, for this example I am going to pop it into make sure that your swap is on Yo

Install yq | A light weight yaml parser cli

is a command line utility for parsing and querying yaml, like does for json. This is for me I love that all of these modern tools built in go and rust, just give you a zipped up executable right from GitHub releases, but it's not necessarily straight forward how to install them. does one of the best jobs I have seen, giving you instructions on how to get a specific version and install it. I use a bunch of these tools, and for what its worth I trust the devs behind them to make sure they don

Git Worktrees are not so Scary

So worktrees, I always thought they were a big scary things. Turns out they are much simpler than I thought. Myth #1 no special setup I thought you had to be all in or worktrees or normal git, but not both. When I see folks go all in on worktrees they start with a bare repo, while its true this is the way you go all in, its not true that this is required. Lets make a worktree Making a worktree is as easy as making a branch. It's actually just a branch that lives in another place in your files

Setup SSH from chromebook to home desktop

I write many of these posts from a 10 year old desktop that sits in my office these days. It does a very fine job running all of the things I need it to for my side work, but sometimes I want a mobile setup. I don't really want to spend the $$ on a new laptop just for the few times I want to be somewhere else in the house. What I do have though is a chromebook. I've tried to get the chromebook into my workflow in the past, but have failed. Much because by the time I got all of my tools up an

Dedupe your shell paths

If you have ever ran and see duplicate entries it's likely that you have duplicate entries in your $PATH. You can clean this up with a one liner at the end of your bashrc or zshrc.

Bash mktemp

There is GNU coreutils command called that is super handy in shell scripts to make temporary landing spots for files so that they never clash with another instance, and will automatically get cleaned up when you restart, or whenever gets wiped. I'm not sure when that is, but I don't expect it to be long. Making temp directories Here are some examples of making temp directories in different places, my favorite is . Use Case Here is a sample script that shows how to capture the tempdir as a

Recover a lost git branch with checkout

Once you give a branch the big D ( ) its gone, its lost from your history. It's completely removed from your log. There will be no reference to these commits, or will there? TLDR Checkout is your savior, all you need is the commit hash. Immediate Regret your terminal is still open We have all done this, you give branch the big D only to realize it was the wrong one. Don't worry, not all is lost, this is the easiest to recover from. When you run the delete command you will see something like

Install obs flatpak

Big announcement recently that obs studio now builds out to a flatpak, hopefully making it easier for all of us to install, especially us near normies that don't regularly compile anything from source. install flatpak I did not have flatpak installed so the first thing I had to do was get the command installed, and add their default repo. Once I had flatpak, I was able to get obs installed with the following command. Once Installed it fired right up for me with the next command they suggested.

Vim remaps use cmd in place of :

Anyone just starting out their vim customization journey is bound to run into this error. I did not get it I'll admit, in hindsight it's very clear what this is trying to tell me, but for whatever reason I still did not understand it and I just used a : everywhere. From the docs If you run you will see a lot of reasons why you should do it, from performance, to hygene, to ergonomics. You will also see another clear statement about how to use . When to map with a : You still need to map your

Bluetooth at the command line on Ubuntu

One thing about moving to a tiling window manager like awesome wm or i3 is that they are so lightweight they are all missing things like bluetooth gui's out of the box, and you generally bring your own. Today I just needed to connet a new set of headphones, so I decided to just give the cli a try. It seems to come with Ubuntu, I don't think I did anything to get it. Running pops you into a repl/shell like bah, python, or ipython. From here you can execute commands. Here is what I had to

Simple Samba Share Setup

Samba is an implementation of the smb protocol that allows me to setup network shares on my linux machine that I can open on a variety of devices. I think the homelab is starting to intrigue me enought to dive into the path of experimenting with different things that I might want setup in my own home. One key piece of this is network storage. As I looked into nas, I realized that it takes a dedicated machine, or one virtualized at a lower level than I have capability for right now. Humble Begin

ag silver searcher look ahead and look behind

A super useful tool when doing PR's or checking your own work during a big refactor is the silver searcher. Its a super fast command line based searching tool. You just run to search for your search term. This will list out every line of every file in any directory under your current working directory that contains a match. Ahead/Behind It's often useful to need some extra context around the change. I recently reviewed a bunch of PR's that moved schema from to the root of the dataset in a

Installing Rust and Cargo on Ubuntu 21.10 using An...

Installing rust in your own ansible playbook will make sure that you can get consistent installs accross all the machines you may use, or replicate your development machine if it ever goes down. Personal philosophy I try to install everything that I will want to use for more than just a trial inside of my ansible playbook. This way I always get the same setup across my work and home machines, and anytime I might setup a throw away vm. reccommended install This is how rust reccomends that you in

Neovim Config for Git

Creating a minimal config specifically for git commits has made running much more pleasant. It starts up Much faster, and has all of the parts of my config that I use while making a git commit. The one thing that I often use is autocomplete, for things coming from elsewhere in the tmux session. For this specifically is super helpful. The other thing that is engrained into my muscle memory is for escape. For that I went agead and added my and with no noticable performance hit. Here is

How to Properly Simulate Stow

Tmux and Vim Clipboard for Ubuntu

One of the first things I noticed broken in my terminal based workflow moving from Windows wsl to ubuntu was that my clipboard was all messed up and not working with my terminal apps. Luckily setting tmux and neovim to work with the system clipboard was much easier than it was on windows. First off you need to get if you don't already have it provided by your distro. I found it in the apt repositories. I have used it between Ubuntu 18.04 and 21.10 and they all work flawlessly for me. I have

Tmux hotkey for copier templates

I have added a hotkey to my copier template setup to quickly access all my templates at any time from tmux. At any point I can hit , thats holding control and hitting , and I will get a popup list of all of my templates directory names. Its an fzf list, which means that I can fuzzy search through it for the template I want, or arrow key to the one I want if I am feeling insane. I even setup it up so that the preview is a list of the files that come with the template in tree view. I've had t

Copier Tasks | Python templating post run task

Copier allows you to run post render tasks, just like cookiecutter. These are defined as a list of in your . They are simply shell commands to run. The example I have below runs an bash script after the copier template has been rendered. I have put the script in so that I know it's always on my . It will reach back into the and update the default number.

fuzzy wallpaper with fzf

I really appreciate that in linux anything can be scripted, including setting the wallpaper. So everytime I disconnect a monitor I can just rerun my script and fix my wallpaper without digging deep into the ui and fussing through a bunch of settings. I set my default wallpaper with using the command above. Leaning in on feh, we can use fzf to pick a wallpaper from a directory full of wallpapers with very few keystrokes. I have mine alias'd to so that I can quickly run it from my terminal.

Converting markdown to pdf with pandoc on linux

Converting markdown posts to pdf on ubuntu takes a few packages from the standard repos. I had to go through a few stack overflow posts, and nothing seemed to have all the fonts and packages that I needed to convert markdown, but this is what ended up working for me. Installing all the packages Using pandoc to convert markdown to a pdf results of converting this post to a pdf Here is an image of what converting this article over to a pdf looks like. The raw markdown is here .

Installing Pipx on Ubuntu

I recently paired up with another dev running windows with Ubuntu running in wsl, and we had a bit of a stuggle to get our project off the ground because they were missing com system dependencies to get going. Straight in the terminal Open up a terminal and get your required system dependencies using the apt package manager and the standard ubuntu repos. Using an Ansible-Playbook I like running things like this through an ansible-playbook as it give me some extra control and repeatability next t

2 minutes to stow

Stow is an incredible way to manage your dotfiles. It works by managing symlinks between your dotfiles directory and the rest of the system. You can then make your dotfiles directory a git repo and have it version controlled. In my honest opinion, when I was trying to get started the docs straight into deep detail of things I frankly don't really care about and jumped right over how to use it. When using stow its easiest to keep your dotfiles directory (you may name it what you want) in your

Using Copier Answers to rerun templates quickly

The copier answers file is a key component to making your templates re-runnable. Let's look at the example for my setup.py. Inside of my file is this, a message not to muck around with it, and the ansers in yaml form. The first line is just a helper for the blog post. Inside my copier.yml I have setup my _answers_file to point to a special file. This is because this is not a whole projet template, but one just for a single file. Once I change the _answers_file I was incredibly stuck Run it

Remove Vim Tab Characters

I've been stuck many times looking at a vim buffer with little question marks at the beginning of each line and trying to get rid of them. for so long I didn't know what they were so trying to get rid of them was impossible. example of what the tab character renders as in my editor It turns out they are tabs, and you can get rid of the little leading question marks with this substitution command.

Tmux Pop size

tmux popups can be sized how you like based on the % width of the terminal on creation by using the flags (h, w, x, y) for height, width, and position. example running these commands

List all the files containing a phrase

One of the most useful skills you can acquire to make you faster at almost any job that uses a computer is getting good at finding text in your current working diretory and identifying the files that its in. I often use the silver searcher or ripgrep to find files in large directories quickly. Both have a sane set of defaults that ignore hidden and gitignored files, but getting them to list only the filenames and not the matched was not trivial to me. I've searched throught he help/man pag

My first impressions with pyenv

pyenv provides an easy way to install almost any version of python from a large list of distributions. I have simply been using the version of python from the os package manager for awhile, but recently I bumped my home system to Ubuntu 21.10 impish, and it is only 3.9+ while the libraries I needed were only compatable with up to 3.8. I needed to install an older version of python on ubuntu I've been wanting to check out pyenv for awhile now, but without a burning need to do so. installing Based

Installing Homebrew on Linux

Installing brew on linux proved quite easy and got pyenv running for me within 4 commands. I had never used homebrew before, honestly I thought it was a mac only thing for years. Today I wanted to try out pyenv, and the reccommended way to install was using homebrew. I am not yet sure if I want either in my normal workflow, so for now I am just going to pop open a new terminal and install homebrew and see how it goes. That was it, now homebrew is working. Starting a new shell and running the c

Serve html from your command line

When I first moved to vim from and ide like vscode or sublime text one of my very first issues was trying to preview my website at . There had always just been a button there to do it in all of my other editors, not vim. There are not many buttons for anything in vim. While there is probably a plugin that can run a webserver for me in vim, it's not necessary, we just need the command line we are already in. running a separate process You will need a way to run another process alongside vim,