Android phones all enable RCS in the messaging app by default now.
I never thought much about it since I never really use SMS. Today though I received an SMS from a customer telling me that their internet connection wasn't working. They would normally open a ticket, send an email, or message on Wha...

Everyone knows about ulimit to show and set the current shell's maximum number of open files (among other things), but what if you want to know the total number of open files on the whole system. I thought I could find the global number of open files by running lsof | wc -l but this number als...

The find command can optionally pass the files it finds to another command using the -exec option. The syntax is easy, just add -exec 'other_command ;' as an argument to find. But I did that, and it's telling me find: missing argument to `-exec'.

Turns out it just needs the semi-colon es...

Over the years my fibre (FTTC) broadband speed has slowly dropped from about 60Mbps to less than 40Mbps. This is probably due to the crosstalk as more people on my cabinet get fibre activated. I can still get 60Mbps by changing the SNR margin but the DLM system doesn’t like that even though the conn...

Update: This issue also seems to affect Windows users. It looks like CS2 is requesting a sample rate of 44100 Hz and just assumes it got it even when it doesn't. So if your audio device is operating at 48000 Hz or higher you are going to get a sound delay after a while. The higher the operating rate...

Update: Changed the method for finding the latest version

I had been using a script which kept youtube-dl up to date automatically, but youtube-dl doesn't seem to have received an update for a long time. It still works, but very slowly for some reason. I have now found yt-dlp which seems to...

I have a cron job which dumps my influx database nightly before borg does a backup of it. It does that by running influx backup in the container with the command:

docker exec influx /usr/local/bin/influx backup /backups

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it gives the error OCI runtime exec f...

I have been "grinding" coffee beans and making fresh coffee for years, but never really wondered if I was doing it right until now. Apparently I wasn't. I use a french press so need coarse ground coffee, but my coffee grinder is an electric one that only produces fine ground coffee. I was also only...

I decided to play around with keycloak and use OpenLDAP as the backend to store the user details. That sounds like a pretty simple thing to set up, and actually it was - that is until I noticed that when I modify a password in keycloak then it gets stored in plain text in the ldap database. Goog...

You can use ulimit -c 0 to disable core dumps, but that obviously won't remove any core files that are already sitting on your filesystem - and sometimes you have no idea where they might be since different stuff can be running in the background from any directory. These files can be a few gigabyt...

I recently started getting the message commandline disabled when pressing the ~C escape key in ssh. I thought it must have been something to do with the server I was connected to but it turns out it was my openssh client.

After a recent update I have openssh 9.2 installed and that seems to...

It seem that Slackware and Steam don't always play well together at the moment.
The other day I had problems with CS:GO getting stuck, and now I have found EAC games don't work, and also don't give a helpful error message. This is what I get whenever trying to start an EAC game:

And lookin...

A recent update has broken csgo so it's not updating the screen. It seems that it is a change to X11 though and not a Steam or CS:GO update. The screen only refreshes as long as you are moving your mouse or pressing a key which makes it very hard to play. I have this problem on Slackware64-current b...

I finally have my SMETS1 smart meter linked to a device which lets me monitor it myself. I got a Hildebrand CAD which supports local MQTT which was really easy to get set up. I then use telegraf to pull the power reading from MQTT and add them to my influxdb which I then query from grafana. Th...

Every time I have either forgotten to forward a port over SSH, or needed to SSH into another machine first so I could find out what IP and port I needed to forward to, I have closed the SSH session and started a new one with the correct -L or -R option. After all these years I just found out tha...

Mosquitto is an MQTT message broker which has an official docker image. You probably have devices which can publish messages using MQTT (like your electricity smart meter), and want to subscribe to those messages for graphing it using something like telegraf and grafana. The mosquitto_passwd too...