There is a great weechat script called prism.py. It assigns random colors to each letter in your message and sends it to the chat, making it look like a rainbow. I wanted something similar for Konversation, wchih I'm using on my personal laptop, so when I finally opened the documentation and saw that it supports scripting, I had no more excuses.
Here is the script.
When I got my new laptop two months ago, I needed to choose a Linux distro to install. Arch was my go-to for the last 15 years on desktops, but even though it usually works fine, breaking updates can happen. That's not what I wanted on a portable device I might need to take somewhere on short notice. Since Debian Trixie was about to be released, I decided to give it a try. After all, I'd been using Debian on servers for years, and it's always worked flawlessly.
I recently bought a laptop that came with an RTL8852BE network controller. After installing Debian, I faced an issue with the wireless connection: it wouldn't disconnect or show any errors, but traffic would stop moving. So I went online, looking for a solution.
Navigraph is probably the most popular source of navigation data for flight simulators. Roughly once a month they release a new data package with updated waypoints and metadata, such as altitude and speed restrictions, as well as changes to procedures at airports around the world. Updating this data can be a bit tedious, so they offer a program to help us with that - which, of course, isn’t available on Linux. There isn't much information on this topic online, so hear me out, world wide web: you can run FMS Data Manager using WINE.
I've recently switched from Plasma to Cinnamon, and so far, I like it. However, while the latter is more stable, it's also less feature-rich - at least on Arch Linux. So, when I'd installed GNOME Sreenshot, I realized that I can't really configure it through the user interface. It's rather basic, with no settings in the menu to change the default directory or file format.
Search results on the subject were old, with posts dating back 10-15 years, which always makes me suspicious: how relevant is that information today? That's why I decided to jot down my findings.
I had an issue with X-Plane 12 crashing on launch in my NVIDIA and Wayland setup. I checked the log file, but it didn't indicate any specific problem. Everything looked normal until:
--=={This application has crashed!}==--
I want to share a solution that I found.
I decided to try Wayland due to some issues I suspect might be related to Xorg. So far, so good. However, it comes with its own problems. Spare layouts don't seem to be working as expected. It's a super useful feature for those who have more than two layouts because it makes cycling through them much easier. According to the documentation:
Spare layouts allow to toggle between small number of layouts easily while keeping more layouts handy close by. For example you might use 3 languages: English, Ukrainian and German but first two are used often and third one just occasionally. In this case you can configure first two as main layouts and German one as spare one - when you toggle with keyboard and left mouse button the switch will happen between main layouts only but you can always choose 3rd layout with context menu.
Here is my configuration:
I want alt+shift to only switch between English and Russian. Unfortunately, this setup doesn't work as intended: all layouts are in the rotation. Therefore, switching from Russian to English takes an extra step through German. Ideally, I want to use German only when I'm practicing it via the applet on the taskbar.
I found a workaround for this bug!
The state of racing simulators on Linux today is not as bad as I expected. Last time I tried them about ten years ago, it was still a plain WINE without DirectX to Vulkan translation layers, Valve hadn't released Proton yet, and other improvements by numerous contributors from the open-source community weren't available. Games like rFactor simply didn't work at all.
Recently, I decided to give it another shot. Even though Linux still might not be a viable option for all simracers, I found it doable!
Music streaming services provide us access to huge libraries, which is great! Algorithms study what we like and offer useful recommendations or let us discover something entirely new.
However, we can only access what has been officially released. Some "live in ${city.name}" DVD release that you enjoy might not be available on a streaming service. Occasionally, artists and labels end up in legal battles, and the content that was released in the '80s and '90s suddenly can't be distributed anymore. Over time, I started to notice that a playlist with my favorite music lost at least a third of the tracks I liked to listen to! That makes other sources of obtaining music relevant again.
YouTube is one of them. The quality is not fantastic due to irreversible compression, but there are so many live recordings, obscure releases, and covers that I find it worth it. As I store music on my home server, I needed a solution that wouldn't pollute it with hundreds and hundreds of packages. Yes, I'm looking at you, ffmpeg! Probably most tools that can download and process videos from YouTube depend on ffmpeg.
So if you too want to utilize yt-dlp in an isolated environment, I can offer dockerization!
