John’s Home Page

The problem: I want to use Synology Active Backup for Business (ABB) to backup all of my company's computers, but I have a lot of laptops and I don't want the backups to run if someone is on a mobile hotspot. The solution? PowerShell and…

If you need a pixel art style heart SVG file, you've come to the right place.

This is a recipe that few on this planet appreciate.  I believe that only I and my Aunt Mary are the extant Woltmans that enjoy this wonderful entree. It is a spicy spaghetti made with Campbell's tomato soup and cayenne pepper.

I was recently given a hand-me-down Remarkable 2 tablet, which is good because I would never have spent on money it - not because it's not good, but because it's $600 for essentially an e-ink sketch pad.  I wanted to mark up some e-books I own, but they're from Amazon, so I had to figure out how convert them to a format the Remarkable would support.

Here's the quick version:

• Install an e-book program called Calibre (it's free / open source).
  
• Install the Calibre plugin KFX Input from the Calibre plugin menu.
• Install another Calibre plugin called DeDRM. This one has to be manually downloaded & installed. You don't have to unzip the file.
• Your Kindle's serial number.
• Download an e-book linked to that Kindle.

Hit the read more link if you want to see more details & screenshots (Calibre has a unique interface imo).

I had to use Gnome the other day and I did not enjoy it.  What started out as a few "hmmm, that's kinda weird" misgivings quickly grew into a more powerful "oh, oh no, this is all wrong" terror.  Everything felt familiar, but slightly off, like a bad dream.

I found that I could not do tasks that I've been doing for decades, such as moving a dialog window out of the way to see what was underneath, nor could I set my background to plain, solid color to cut down on distractions.

Looking deeper I found that Gnome was composed of so many dreadful decisions and baffling behaviors that I was going to have to write a long-winded article complaining about it all.  So read on if you'd like to hear about the many, MANY ways that Gnome is bad, and how to fix it!

• Update 8/31/2024: Updated file picker section based on feedback from an unbiased source.
• Update 9/2/2024: A person on Mastodon linked me to this excellent article further explaining why the Files app is hot garbage.
• Update 9/5/2024: Clarified why Gnome + Firefox = 😕

Simple recipe for when it's hard to chew.  For Jen.

While using Linux I was unhappy that, by default, extracting archives like ZIP files is a multi-step process on KDE Plasma.  But, with the help from some others, I have a fix.

While doing some research, I had to read a bunch of bug reports, mostly related to my article about how Gnome isn't a good interface.  Here is the best one by far (and no, it's not about thumbnails).

I decided to split my blog up between my general interests and family stuff.  

The phrase "will 20xx be the year of Linux on the desktop?" started as a serious question, but over the past 24 years of it never ever being the year of Linux on the desktop, the question became a punchline.  Except now, in the year 2024, it might finally be true for some people, and by some people, I mean me.  Read on to find out what I think about the experience of using Linux as my daily driver.