I was transitioning this blog from using Jekyll to Hexo. After comparing both, I feel I made the right choice. However, I almost started off on the wrong foot. Being unfamiliar with Node.js, I was reviewing the Hexo install instructions and the first thing it tells you is to install via: 1npm install hexo-cli -g I'm …

I bought this laptop with a touchscreen and occasionally find myself using it while surfing websites. Now with Chrome that worked just fine but with Firefox it tends to select areas of text instead of scrolling. That sucks! Fortunately it's quite fixable. You just have to modify the .desktop file (or launch from the …

I bought an HP Envy x360 a few months ago. It had the right combination of features I wanted. Touchscreen, 360 flip, smaller screen size, and decent graphics chip. The plan was I wanted to draw, read, and play games on a computer while running linux. Shouldn't be that hard to do but surpringly, any computers that have …

Note that this article for local installation of Maria DB or MySQL. It's intended to help you get up and running with the database locally and is not intended as a production tutorial. If you need to use either in a production environment, please contact a professional. Step 1: update and install 1sudo apt update 2sudo …

I bought an HP Envy x360 and out of the box it works pretty well with linux. I've got Ubuntu 18.10 installed and have only had to tweak a couple of minor things. There is however, one big problem and that is the touch screen doesn't work. It might be the HP firmware (I am still figuring out how to update it in linux) …

01/2019 update: This doesn't seem to be necessary with the 4.20 kernel! I recently bought an HP Envy x360 13" with AMD Ryzen 5 and Vega 8 graphics. I'll get into why another time but one of the things that didn't work quite well had to do with the laptop freezing every once in a while. It seemed random at first …

I've been using ChromeOS as my main development machine for a while now. At first I logged in under my personal gmail and used Crouton for development, but after Crostini I decided to separate out my work and personal items. Here are a few things that still bother me and why I might go back to a full linux environment: …

I've noticed that particularly in Ubuntu Xenial, an apt-upgrade to mysql 5.7 fails. A standard re-install doesn't work for me so I've resorted to more extreme methods to get my install working. This is only suitable for development, mind you. Please do not attempt in production without full backups and supervision. …

Often times I find myself using ssh to get to a server in order to get a file. The problem is that my local machine doesn't have its own publicly accessible IP address. So I end up ssh'ing into the remote server, creating the file I need (e.g. database backup) and then exiting only to run scp from my local machine …

More for my own reference and in preparation of me completely gutting my system, I'm posting the contents of my .xmodmaprc file which swaps the left control and alt-keys. This allows me to use my linux laptop more like I used my mac, with the command key. Many distributions now let you swap this from a setting but if …