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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. ...

Do you get log entries that look like this? Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd-logind[329]: New session 3264 of user foo. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session opened for user foo by (uid=0) Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting user-1000.slice. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Created slice user-1000.slice. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting Session 3264 of user foo. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Started Session 3264 of user foo. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting User Manager for UID 1000... Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Paths. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Paths. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Timers. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Timers. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Sockets. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Sockets. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Basic System. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Basic System. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Default. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Default. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Startup finished in 13ms. Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Started User Manager for UID 1000. Jun 29 10:40:31 www console-kit-daemon[1489]: missing action Jun 29 10:40:32 www systemd-logind[329]: Removed session 3264. Jun 29 10:40:32 www systemd: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session closed for user foo I got hundreds upon hundreds of kilobytes of logspam like that and I wanted to solve the root cause, not just ignore it in logcheck. I happened to stumble upon the solution on LinuxQuestions.org, and promptly made a fool out of myself there, too. One solution is to enable lingering for user accounts that have cronjobs. For root, that would be: loginctl enable-linger root Since I searched for quite some time but this didn’t come up immediately, I’m putting it here to increase findability. ...

Before you throw any bricks, know that I’ve been a Jolla supporter from before day one. I had my preorder in there and my money earmarked the moment I knew it wasn’t going to be vaporware. I ran the Swiss Jolla Twitter community for several months even before there was a product and I have a TOHKBD and a Jolla Tablet preordered, as well as a second spare Jolla phone sitting in its original packaging. ...

In the last 8 years or so, I’ve regularly looked at the ebook market to figure out if they’ve fixed it yet. In 2015 I can say: no, they haven’t. But there is a new star on the horizon, at least. Let’s start with a harmless example: Out of the five sci-fi ebooks that Kobo recommends for 2014, they refuse to sell you three. They claim that the books are not available in your country, Switzerland in my case. However, if you check out the competition, you notice that even newcomers to the ebook market like Thalia/Orell Füssli have the ebooks. What’s even worse, Amazon will not hestitate to sell all those five books to you for Kindle. ...

For several months, I’ve been using Steffen Brüntjen’s EurKEY keyboard layout. That layout combines a general US feel with special characters for many western European languages. That’s fantastic for programmers. You get easy access to keyboard shortcuts that would otherwise be impossible or in weird locations – try typing Alt-` on a Swiss-German keyboard for example, you’ll find it’s impossible. When it comes to braces, most keyboard layouts in Europe are a nightmare. Some require shifting, some require alt-shift to get to the braces and quotes you need several hundred times a day as a programmer. EurKEY instead makes all manner of braces available with one keystroke, just like on a US keyboard. This makes it much more relaxing to type, whether on the shell, in an editor or in some heavyweight IDE. ...

If you’re running KDE and Pulseaudio and have the problem that you can’t configure your audio sources in KDE’s multimedia settings, there might just be a component missing: apt-get install vlc-plugin-pulse I’m not sure if this is usually part of some KDE desktop metapackage, but for me this package had been missing and one of the symptoms was that only “alsa” and “oss” were shown as audio sources, with no sound playing at all. Those icons also had little VLC traffic cones on their heads. ...

I just found this very helpful blog post by Alexander, listing the proper CalDAV/CardDAV URLs to use with SyncEvolution on Sailfish OS if you want to sync with ownCloud. Make sure to make backups of your contacts and calendars before you start, since setting the wrong side to be master can potentially wipe out all your data on the other end (as it should, you fool!)

If you need Chinese character input in KDE (typing in pinyin and then selecting the correct word), it’s quite simple on Debian GNU/Linux: apt-get install task-chinese-s-kde-desktop fcitx-pinyin That’s all there is to it. Afterwards you should be able to start fcitx in KDE and you get a new icon in your system tray. Go there to configure your input methods. By default, ctrl-space will switch to another input method, if you don’t have anything else installed, that will be pinyin input. Ctrl-space again will take you back to one of your previous input methods. ...