A billion people have written about this before, but I like my approach, so I’m sharing it in case someone else finds it useful. Most of my passwords go into a password manager; those are long and random and generated by the password manager and I don’t care whether they’re easy to type or memorable… Read More »
I am often running prerelease versions of Ubuntu, for three reasons: (a) in general I like to help find with finding bugs in prerelease software that I use and benefit from, to give back to the community; (b) I specifically want to find and report bugs that impact me in Ubuntu prereleases to increase the… Read More »
As of March 18, 2021, DisplayLink support in Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) is even more broken than I wrote about in my earlier blog posting describing how to make it work. They’ve just put Linux kernel version 5.11 into the release package stream, and evdi, the kernel module required for DisplayLink to work, isn’t yet… Read More »
UPDATE: The modified installer described below is necessary, but no longer sufficient to make DisplayLink work with Ubuntu 21.04. Please see this newer blog posting for additional details. The DisplayLink installer for Ubuntu currently being distributed by the folks at DisplayLink.com is incompatible with Ubuntu 21.04. I’ve made some minor changes to make it work.… Read More »
Recently, I was confronted with the problem of automating the activation and deactivation of parental controls on my TP-Link Archer AX6000 router. Specifically, I needed a command-line tool that would allow me to disable or enable internet access for a specific parental controls profile. The router only provides the ability to set separate schedules for… Read More »
For the last several years I’ve coordinated the group ticket order for my kids’ school for an annual dance festival that the school participates in. We don’t get to pick our seats for the group order; we tell the festival how many tickets we’re buying, and we get back tickets they’ve chosen. I’ve always tried… Read More »
The Thunderbird team needs to figure out how to make it possible for extension maintainers to port their extensions to newer Thunderbird versions without a huge amount of effort. Many Thunderbird users rely on extensions, and they are going to keep using Thunderbird 60 until the extensions they rely on are supported in newer versions.
My kids watch a lot of Netflix. Some of them watch it too much, and my wife and I want to be able to turn off the spigot at night so that they’ll go to sleep without us having to confiscate all the phones and tablets in the house. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t have parental controls… Read More »
Where I work, we have employees who use (in decreasing order of popularity) Mac OS, Windows, and Linux as their desktop computers. We’ve deployed a large, complex remote administration / MDM application for managing the Mac OS and Windows desktops. It’s big and complicated and difficult to maintain. It does much more than we will… Read More »
The best way to configure Ubuntu for an encrypted root filesystem is to tell the installer to do it when you’re installing the operating system. It’s complicated, and smart people have put a lot of effort into making the installer know how to do it properly. Having said that, if you’re an experienced Linux sysadmin… Read More »