Category Archives: Tips & Tricks
gibs: extracting Windows 10 spotlight pictures

yes, i’m alive.

i typed what’s below quite a time ago, why i didn’t publish, i don’t know, but now – yes…

i have more potential posts in mind, so things might pick up here again. it’d be nice to give this old place a new coat of paint, too.

Windows 10 has a thing. A thing where it displays some featured image on the Lock Screen. If you have a look at the ‘Personalization’ settings for the Lock Screen, the thing is called ‘Windows spotlight.’ Well sometimes it’s a rather nice picture and maybe you want it, yes? Well you can have it, and I’ll tell you how to get it.

Read More…
nordp2p: automating OpenVPN server selection and connection

One fateful day, when I’d just got light in my fibre,
An email came my way. Snigger and giggle I did,
When I read what that email did bid,
And the button for trash did I smash.

Then a little while later, another damn mail on the wire!
Taken aback, I thought “ah frack,”
And conceded to put pause to my downloader.

Applying a little gumption,
I decided to heck with this setback!
Downloader now on resumption,
There’ll be no pesky watchers of my SYN-ACK!

“This is my tunnel,” Shrek whispered…

Look ma, I done a poetry!

Read More…

Thoughts on t-t-the W10 Creators Update

So, the Windows 10 Creators Update. It’s out, and for the most part it seems good. There’s a lot of new stuff, my personal favourites being the introduction of Game Mode (for better or worse), and the changes to Windows Update which allow you to pause updates. And Storage Sense is worth a mention (basically a smarter, automated disk cleanup). There are niggles too, of course. Chief among them being the introduction of more “suggestions” (read: ads) in different parts of Windows, and a particularly frustrating problem of frame rate issues in games.

Read More…

Speaking of updates…

Was that a hiatus? Let’s call it a hiatus. Should that be “an” hiatus? Let’s call it semantics and not care.

Is this a weird way to start a post?

tangled hair glasses

Let’s call it quirky.

Read More…

Everyday Scripting: Launch ALL the game clients

You know what really grinds my gears? Opening game clients one by one when I want them all to open and update. So I engaged in a little every-day-scripting to stop the grinding. “Code” inside.

00-everyday-scripting-launch-all-the-game-clients

Read More…

Linux Partition Divisions

So. You already know what’s happening here (probably) because the title is obvious (hopefully). But for the title-skippers in the crowd I’ll lay out the introduction-with-waffle: far too often I find myself having a go at a duck, in an effort to educate myself (again) about good partitioning schemes for new Linux installations (in this case Debian).

Is this a deep dive yet?

Is this a deep dive yet?

I’m tired of doing that, so now we have this post to document my latest preferred partition scheme. Now, when (not if) I’m repeating this Linux/Debian installation exercise in the future, I’ll just have a go at myself.

Read More…

Theme the Night

Let’s see just how much we can narrow the target audience for this post, shall we?

Do you use RSS feeds to keep up with the news? Do you host your own TT-RSS server to monitor those RSS feeds? Are you running a Sandstorm instance (bonus question: on the Oasis platform)? Do you run your TT-RSS server as a grain on your Sandstorm instance? Do you use the night.css TT-RSS theme? Finally, do the greyscaled images of the theme annoy you?

If you answered yes to /all/ of those questions, you are probably one of these: a) you are me (hello), b) you follow, and use, the news-upkeep methods I describe alarmingly closely, c) the internet brought you here when you searched for a solution to your annoyance and somehow we do the same things and this is exactly what you were looking, and we’re clearly cosmically connected or whatever (make of that what you will).

I knew it, from the Mormont we met...

I knew it, from the Mormont we met…

All that is a very long way of saying that I have made startlingly basic CSS modifications to my TT-RSS theme to stop it greyscaling the images in my feeds, and I’m about to describe just how I did it.

Read More…

Tip-o-Thursday: PsTools

Want a tip? Have a tip. Sometimes tech, sometimes life, sometimes not a tip at all. Now faced with the prospect of not posting this month (shock and horror!), I throw ’em out there with wild abandon.

Like this, except [more || less] delicious.

Like this, except [more || less] delicious.

Satisfy* your hunger after the jump.

Read More…

GRUBbed Up: Mounts of Future Past

Have you ever set a GRUB boot password, unwittingly buggering it up with a typo, and then panicked when your rebooting host claimed you were giving it the wrong password so it wouldn’t boot? On an LVM disk system? I have. Just last week, in fact. Wanna know how I fixed it?

Hit the jump, then.

lolwut systemd

lolwut systemd

Read More…

Reading the Sandstorm

I’m totally not compensating for failing to post in March.
Just thought I’d get that out of the way. Y’know, to ward off questions.

Many moons ago (like two damn years’; wowzor ‘n stuff), I pumped out text detailing how I keep up with the news-ey things that interest me. Well, the inexorable passage of time has seen that old post turn to a falsehood. Now I, in a narcissistic revisitation of old material, decided it was high time I let my valuable readers know that things just don’t work like that any more.

Apparently a clock. Of Persian origin.

Apparently a clock. Of Persian origin.

Read More…

Next Page

css.php