The Linux version of Spotify provides a way to control the music using the DBus org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify service. This lets you skip tracks, play, and pause the music. It doesn't let you change the volume though.

If you are using PulseAudio or PipeWire then you can use the pactl command to...

Piper is a Linux application that lets you change the settings of your gaming mouse. It can currently be used to set what the buttons to, change the DPI and reporting rate, and set the LED colors. Piper is actually just a GUI for the libratbag project which does all the actual work of changing th...

I recently changed the long press delay in my Google Keyboard settings to be lower than the default because it has started feeling like it takes too long for the long press symbol or number to come up. I don't know if Google changed the defaults or if I am just imagining it got longer :).

Anyway,...

After playing around with exportify, I decided to find out how the Spotify API works. Of course, a Python module already exists called Spotipy that helps you connect to the Web API.

This can easily be installed with pip install spotipy and has good documentation here

I wanted to see if I co...

While I was going for a walk today I randomly started wondering if it was possible to download a Spotify playlist as a text file or CSV file. It didn't take long for me to find the Exportify project which can be used to make a backup copy of your Spotify playlists. It was easy to get it up and run...

I recently bought some cheap LED backlights to replace the old one from my screen. My old one had a simple switch to just turn it on and off. All the new ones I could find seem to be multicoloured and remote control. I ended up buying some made by Nexillumi for £10 on Amazon which were bluetooth con...

Ok, this isn’t a Linux thing at all. But something I have to do a lot and always forget the command. I can login to the PC and go through the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security UI to enable the Remote Desktop rules which are already there. But it’s much easier for me to just run it remotely usi...

I have been running my own mail server for years on my home broadband connection. Most of the time it has been running fine, and when the connection does go down it hasn’t been for long enough to cause any email problems. But what if I my mail server did lose its internet connection for a couple of...

Not long ago I noticed that my Gmail app allowed me to snooze an email and get the “new mail” notification pop up again later. I use IMAP for my main email addresses though and wanted to have that feature for them. My mail server uses dovecot as the IMAP server which doesn’t support snoozing at the...

I recently had to allow remote access for a few users so they could connect to their Windows PC’s in the office using remote desktop connection. This was just for a small network which didn’t have a Windows server, so no Remote Desktop Gateway. We could have just used something like TeamViewer but s...