Over the period of this last year I somehow did multiple changes on my little server which runs this site. Gitea For a long time I had issues with Gitea being unresponsive in quicker requests. Now in retrospective I think it could be because the Mariadb was not configured properly to accept many connections at once but only the default number. Well, I solved it by changing the database type to SQLite and it runs nicely now.

I am using ALSA for my system sound and I am trying to keep away from PulseAudio and PipeWire things. I do not like them that. I know they provide a way to disable the system sound, just open PavuControl and mute the “System Sounds” channel and done. For ALSA I did not manage to find such a simple way to do it. I also did not find a way to disable it in KDE or Qt configuration files (or I did not search hard enough).

Simple story the likes of which happens all the time where an incorrect example together with my lack of knowledge led me to the world of hurt. In the Falkon example QML extension in order to set some basic (top level) element the original author decided to use Rectangle component (or class? or object? or whatever, I will call it component). The Rectangle component is not supposed to be used this way since it is by default also setting the background to white and thus it is not styled by the KDE theme.

Intro My 10 years old laptop has basically touch and look sensitive connectors, audio jack included. This means that the headphones plugged status is changed at random and with default settings in PulseAudio and PipeWire it will cause constant switching to speakers and I will be unable to enjoy my music (the soundcard is not great but the USB hub is also out of question since USB ports are also often touch sensitive).

Shortly this post is inspired by a Lukes video when he rumbles about todays search engines. https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/search-engines-are-totally-useless:c Most of the things I search on the web are related to the similar things over and over againg. So the results I get are almost always to the same handful of websites over and over again. Since my interest often lies in computers, programming and linux I truly get just handful of sites for my searches. A short example can be StachExchange, StackOverflow, language manuals or documentation, Archwiki pages and from time to time some other site (but this is very rare).

When I got a new computer a while ago I installed PulseAudio (PA) on it since I wanted to comfortably use USB headset and switching between it and my system soundcard. PA worked somehow fine but there where some problems with my favourite music player (Music On Console) but it could be to some degree mitigated with a patch. Later Archlinux pushed PipeWire as hard dependency of few packages I had installed (namely kwin and PulseEffects). I can remove kwin safely since I do not use KDE/Plasma and had it for testing and as a backup, but it is really a pity that PulseEffects would be gone since it is great program to play with audio effects on the fly. So switching back to pulse would get rid me of these nice programs (unless I hack the packages which is another work, so why to bother?). The other huge issue with PipeWire is that it has some problems with playing audio. When I start playing (or seek) some video it plays noise for a while until it catches up with something which is pain since PipeWire was advertised to me as a drop-in replacement for PA but it sucks even more.

In mt opinion systemd is a huge pain. SystemD in my eyes is a tool developed by corporation (RedHat) for other corporations (their customers). RedHat guys (and other kinds) have many things (tools, configs, manuals, trainings, webinars…) prepared for it and thus it would be pain for them to stop using it. Other corporations like it because it has support from other corporation which they can call when there is a problem and it is mostly one package which contains almost all basic stuff they will need. I see this as major selling point for it since huge corporations do not wish to play with small things, for them it is better to spend more money and buy something. In other words, it can give a lot of people work and thus a good livelihood.

While modern people can use smart phones for almost anything, I came to conclusion that while it is jack of all trades it rarely gets things right. I do not know if it is because I am old fashioned or just too slow, I am unable to accept using touchscreen devices for longer than few minutes (moments). The main advantage in using specialized device is for me to have specialized functions such as special screen, better battery, keyboard or special keys/buttons, and overall environment which allows me to focus on the given task (or just relaxing) without being disturbed by some annoying notifications (Like most smart phones do when you use them a bit more). In other words I am able to separate tasks and focus only on them.

Few years ago (4 or 5 I think) when I was downloading music in a hope of a higher quality the content was delivered in a 3 files, flac, cue and log. The flac file contains whole CD or album, cue is to describe where/when each song starts, ends, its name and author etc and log is a log from the program which made it. This is all nice and great if you are using some more complicated music player with library function which can create index of the songs contained in such files and play them accordingly from its UI. But as a believer that GUI is bloated I am using Music on Console player which does not have this function and is strictly reading files (so I think). So I needed to split this huge file and extract each song with correct tags.

Until “now” I was happy user of Jekyll static site generator, everything worked fine with it and blog was easy to manage. The major drawback of Jekyll (for me that is) is that it is written in Ruby and I never before worked with Ruby. Because of this I diceded to go the “easy” route and use docker image to simplify the initial installation and Jekyll management. The official docker image works fine, the only thing I needed to do was to add ruby gem local cache so it would not need to download all that mess over and over again (what a hell that is). This setup worked fine until for some reason docker started crashing from time to time. It somehow was always down after some time when I wanted to create some post. And since this is the only thing using docker on my VPS I decided to throw it away and once again jump into the rabbit hole of internet to find a good solution to replace it (I am too lazy to craft one from the ground up).

Some time ago on #artix IRC channel popped up a question on how to get the installed size of all packages in given repository and I together with other people on the channel created a one liner in shell to do exactly that. But before I have to mention that Pacman prints the “Installed size” value when we try to install packages. So one way is to try to install all packages but this can also include dependencies and may require some pacman magic which I am not aware of. I forgot to mention, this method may require root access or sudo privileges which is not good enough for me.

After a while I am writing about changes on this blog. The major changes in short are: New domain name. Self-hosted on VPS which is powered by Artix. Own git server powered by Gitea. Openring integration which provides links to articles from blogs I follow. For the future I plan some things, but the current setup is working fine so I have no idea when it will be done. The things I plan to do in the future are:

My another attempt to break the habit of being up until very late into the night and as such very tired the next day. For years I thought of configuring my computer to suspend at around night time so I will be somehow forced to go to sleep. Well, the main problem with this was that I only thought about it and never actually did any research on this subject.

Or how I spent a weekend. With the latest changes in ksyntaxhighlighting library the old themes (they are called “kateschema”) will become obsolete and one will have to either use some new theme and hope it will fit or try to adapt the old one and spent hours doing so. The old format is a bit complicated, the settings for one language can vary depending on the current file type. In other words you could have different settings if you opened CSS file directly or when styles were used in HTML. This looks like a nice feature to have which allowed users to tweak everything but also added a huge overhead when doing changes to the theme. So one has to decide how to export these changes, I decided to take 2 approaches:

Introduction After a month at new work I realized I need a good way to manage my tasks and things todo lists. Managing things manually is not exactly what I wanted to do and even through the main operating system at work is M$ Windows I decided to try my luck and compile taskwarrior within Cygwin which is luckily present. After going through a bit of problems due to my lack of knowledge of how to do things under M$ Windows and to top it of I also added timewarrior. My primary reason for adding timewarrior is because I like graphs. Seeing colorred graphs representing my work is the best way how to end the month.

Introduction I bought an SSD to replace classic slow HDD on home M$ Windows 10 machine. This SSD is a smaller than the original HDD (250 GB vs 500 GB) so I could not clone whole disk which I hope would be easier (anyway I will probably never know). Initial research Before I started I decided to check internet (DuckDuckGo) and asked how to migrate M$ Windows 10 from HDD to SSD. Sadly all I got and wasted time on were articles advertising commercial product (or features of commercial version) as free product and nothing constructive which would help me. (Such a costly system and it does not even has a migration tool.)

Around a week ago YouTube switched my homepage to their new design with very big video previews which is suitable for tablets or smartphones but totally unusable on desktop with reasonable huge screen. So I searched a way how to disable it, but as almost always there was none. In the end I used “Feedback” function and described how unusable it is on desktop and now (at the time of writing this post) I have older homepage design.

Back in the year I bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with Intel and NVIDIA Optimus gpu. It was not great but I am unable to say it was bad, it still runs fine, so it was a good choice. Even though the Linux support for Optimus enabled gpu was kind of bad it was still manageable. At the time I decided to use Bumblebee + bbswitch (to disable the card), it worked fine. There was a bit of drawback on CPU but it worked kind of nicely, I could run things on NVIDIA with simple command without closing current X.