I was walking home yesterday and I just happened to come across an HP LaserJet p2035n sitting by the dumpster, waiting to be taken away. I've never owned a printer, but this thing looked like it came from an era when such devices were made to be reliable instead of forcing DRM-locked cartridges, so I picked it up and took it with me. After getting situated I started some online research and I figure this brand of printers was manufactured from about 2008-2012, and my printer has a 2012 date.

As it turns out, this tossed printer works perfectly fine. I plugged it into power and ran a test sheet, and it prints almost perfectly. I plugged it via USB-B into my PC running Fedora 41 and immediately it gets picked up and added as usable printer. I then plugged the printer into its Ethernet port and fortunately this thing is new enough to have Bonjour (i.e. mdns) services so once again my PC just immediately finds it and can print. Awesome!

My laptop is a MacBook. While it did detect the printer over the network, it couldn't add the printer because it couldn't find a driver to operate it. I honestly don't understand why that's a problem since I assume macOS also uses CUPS just like Linux. But at any rate, I found the solution:

With CUPS on Linux I can share the printer. After configuring firewall-cmd to allow the ipp service now my iPhone and my MacBook can also print to the shared printer using the generic PostScript driver. So, in conclusion, Linux helped me 1) use this printer with no additional effort of installing drivers, 2) share this printer to devices which were not plug-and-play ready, and 3) print pics of Goku and Vegeta. As always, I love Linux.

When I first set up my web server I don't think Caddy was really a sensible choice. It was still immature (The big "version 2" rewrite was in beta). But it's about five years from when that happened, so I decided to give Caddy a try.

Wow! My config shrank to about 25% from what it was with Nginx. It's also a lot less stuff to deal with, especially from a personal hosting perspective. As much as I like self-hosting, I'm not like "into" configuring web servers. Caddy made this very easy.

I thought the automatic HTTPS feature was overrated until I used it. The fact is it works effortlessly. I do not need to add paths to certificate files in my config anymore. That's great. But what's even better is I do not need to bother with my server notes to once again figure out how to correctly use Certbot when I want to create new certs for subdomains, since Caddy will do it automatically.

I've been annoyed with my Nginx config for a while, and kept wishing to find the motivation to streamline it. It started simple, but as I added things to it over the years the complexity in the config file blossomed. But the thing that tipped me over to trying Caddy was seeing the difference between the Nginx and Caddy configurations necessary for Jellyfin. Seriously. Look at what's necessary for Nginx.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/nginx/#https-config-example

In Caddy that became

jellyfin.example.com {
  reverse_proxy internal.jellyfin.host:8096
}

I thought no way this would work. But it did. First try. So, consider this a field report from a happy Caddy convert, and if you're not using it yet for self-hosting maybe it can simplify things for you, too. It made me happy enough to write about it.

For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I'll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it's short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I'm trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.

And let's say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I'm not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor "whole word"), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.

So... there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?

P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don't need summaries but actual technical descriptions.

There are a lot of good improvements and fixes in this release. As a remorseful Nvidia on Linux user, I am extremely excited that GAMMA_LUT is finally making its debut in the Nvidia driver. This means I can actually try to use Gnome Wayland at night with the night shift feature, assuming other Wayland issues are also resolved.

tl;dr question: How do I get the Handbrake Flatpak to operate at a high niceless level in its own cgroup by default? I'm using Fedora Linux.

So if I understand things correctly, niceness in Linux affects how willing the process scheduler is to preempt a process. However, with cgroups, niceness only affects this scheduling relative to other processes within a cgroup. This means a process running with a high niceness in its own cgroup has the same priority as other processes in equivalent cgroups, and it will not in fact be preempted in a way one would expect.

So why does this matter to me at all? I have a copy of Handbrake installed from Flatpak. And sometimes I want to encode a video in the background while still having a decently responsive desktop experience so I can do other things, and basically let Handbrake occupy the cpu cycles I'm not using. Handbrake and the video encoding process should be at the bottom priority of everything to the maximum extent possible.

But it does not appear to be enough to just go into htop and set the handbrake process's niceness level to 19 and then start an encode, because of the cgroup business I mentioned above.

Furthermore, in my opinion Handbrake should always be the lowest priority process without my having to intervene. I would like to be able to launch it without having to set its niceness. Does anybody have suggestions on this? Is my understanding of the overall picture even correct?

PipeWire 0.3.77 (2023-08-04)

This is a quick bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases.

Highlights

• Fix a bug in ALSA source where the available number of samples was miscaluclated and resulted in xruns in some cases.
• A new L permission was added to make it possible to force a link between nodes even when the nodes can't see each other.
• The VBAN module now supports midi send and receive as well.
• Many cleanups and small fixes.

After approximately 10 months in a release candidacy phase, OpenMW 0.48 has finally been released. A list of changes can be found in the link.

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.48.0 of our open-source engine!

So what does another fruitful year of diligent work bring us this time? The two biggest improvements in this new version of OpenMW are the long-awaited post-processing shader framework and an early version of a brand-new Lua scripting API! Both of these features greatly expand what the engine can deliver in terms of visual fidelity and game logic. As usual, we've also solved numerous problems major and minor, particularly pertaining to the newly overhauled magic system and character animations.

A full list of changes can be found in the link to Gitlab.

What is OpenMW?

"OpenMW is a free, open source, and modern engine which re-implements and extends the 2002 Gamebryo engine for the open-world role-playing game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind."

It is an excellent way to play Morrowind on modern systems, and on alternative systems other than MS Windows. It requires the a copy of the original game data from Morrowind, as OpenMW does not include assets or any other game data - it is simply a recreation of the game engine. OpenMW can be found on Flathub for Linux users here. https://flathub.org/apps/org.openmw.OpenMW