Technology

For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM. It turns out I was very, very wrong. All you need to install on Debian-like guest systems is the package spice-vdagent. You may have to start the service afterwards: apt-get install spice-vdagent systemctl start spice-vdagentd Again, this goes on the guest system. On the host system you just have to make sure you’re connecting through spice with a spice client (outdated documentation about that is here). If you use the Virt-Manager GUI, this is all set up correctly by default for Linux guests. ...

The PaperColor theme has been my favorite vim color theme for quite some time now, and I’m happy to find the same theme in Atom as well, even by the same author! This is PaperColor light And this is PaperColor dark They have been ported to the Base16 color scheme system. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it doesn’t matter at all. Thanks a lot, Nguyen Nguyen, aka NLKNguyen. If I knew how to reach you, I’d send you beer money. ...

Update: This issue is largely resolved nowadays because modern desktop environments include configuration tools for libinput and its acceleration profiles. If you have a recent Debian testing release, you might have noticed that your mouse now behaves very differently. For me, I noticed it when my aiming turned wobbly in Quake. Quake has extremely tight controls and shouldn’t feel as if you’re playing a 2016 console FPS with jelly dildos in place of fingers. So I was a bit surprised when it suddenly did. Also, I couldn’t reliably hit e.g. a close button on a window. ...

TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of companies to keep it independent, to fight Google’s increasing browser dominance and to ensure our privacy. We must also let Mozilla know what we expect from them. Read on to hear my reasoning. ...

I recently found out about the Decentraleyes add-on for Firefox. To understand why Decentraleyes is a good idea and why it can help you protect your privacy, here’s what’s been happening so far: Web developers all over the world have started using the same libraries of Free Software code to solve the same common problems. This is good. Web developers thought it would be a good idea to host this code on CDNs (distributed content delivery networks). This makes pages load faster and takes the (financial) burden of hosting them off the web developers. This is also good. Large companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook – who make money by analyzing and recording your behavior in order to sell private details about you to other companies – have started offering such library hosting for free. This is bad. Because every time you visit a website that refers to such a hosted library, and that’s hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, you give away your intentions to the company hosting the library. You tell Google where you’ve been on the Internet, and by pinging them every time you open any number of websites, they can track where you’re going, whether you’re using your phone, your tablet or your computer, when your preferred time for web surfing is, etc. ...

Once again, I’m on a rampage to destroy all tearing. But this time not on Nvidia but on Intel. I had this problem on both 4400 and 3000 series Intel chips, but I fixed it with this option for the graphics device in xorg.conf: Option "TearFree" "true" Thanks, one more time, the Arch Linux wiki.

If you’ve upgraded to Jessie on a server (or any other machine without X), you might have started noticing strange new messages in your logs that look like this: Nov 4 06:33:21 mail rsyslogd0: action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/0 ] Nov 4 06:33:21 mail rsyslogd-2359: action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2359 ] As discussed in this bug report, that shouldn’t really happen and you can get rid of it by disabling logging to xconsole in rsyslog. Find this section of /etc/syslog/rsyslog.conf and comment it: ...

I recently migrated email providers (several times, actually) and came across the fantastic tool mbsync. It’s included in most GNU/Linux distributions, though sometimes called by its old name, “isync”. mbsync is very powerful, it can not only sync between a remote IMAP server and e.g. a local on-disk mirror that you want to keep so you can back it up, it can also sync between two remote IMAP servers directly. Many very advanced configurations are possible from your own personal .mbsyncrc file. But since it took some time to puzzle together a good config from the semi-cryptic manpage, here are two configs I used for two typical situations. ...

Nvidia’s proprietary driver is notorious for having a lot of tearing and vsync issues. Even if you use their control panel to enable vsync, more often than not it will have no effect. I’ve seen this on a GTX 560, on a 650 Ti, 660 Ti, 860M. Previously I tried using compton to fix this issue, but compton sometimes makes e.g. video display sluggish or seems to add some delay and irregular framerate to games. This won’t work, since for games I want a constant framerate, and drops below 25 or so are unacceptable. ...

In 2013, the famous online ad reseller Google shut down their Google Reader service. If you ask me, and I do have an arsehole as well as an opinion, it was to drive people towards their less customizable, not standards-based News product that they can pepper with ads. But there are other RSS clients and news readers, and of all of those I’ve spent almost two years with TinyTinyRSS and now a month with NewsBlur. ...