Hacks

I use a Logitech Performance MX wireless mouse, on Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), with Gnome 3.30.2 Ubuntu 20.04, with Gnome 3.36.2. This mouse uses regular 1.2V AA NiMH rechargeable battery1, which usually lasts 3 months on a single charge The problem is that Ubuntu’s power system tries to detect how much voltage is left, and either the voltage sensors or the calculation algorithm is completely broken, so it starts to show notifications 6-8 weeks before it really runs out. ...

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is finally out, and with it you now have Gnome out of the box. I’ve been using Gnome for several years, and have enjoyed its minimalism. It took me some time to make it work like I wanted (keyboard, extensions, application menu, etc), but I’m quite happy with everything. Or almost everything. One thing I enjoyed over the years was the ability to customize my keyboard shortcuts. I have dozens of shotcuts - to center windows on my screen, to open programs, start and stop Spotify, to run macros, to log in to my remote servers, and so on. ...

Sometimes you need to edit a file on a remote server, but using vim/emacs is not very practical, due to lag of screen refresh. TextMate users have the classic rmate, but it was implemented in Ruby, which may not be available on the remote server. A better option is to use this version of rmate, implemented in pure Bash. It’s a single file, self-contained, and with no external dependencies. Step by step: ...

[](http://xkcd.com/979/) (note: this post was updated in May 2020 to reflect it works with Ubuntu 20.04 and Gnome 3.36.1. It has also been tested with Ubuntu 18.04 and Gnome 3.28.1. Original title “Using .XCompose with Chrome and Sublime Text”) If you use US International keyboard on Linux (e.g., if you write in Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese), you know the royal pain of having to press space after the compose character (typically '). Contractions like can’t, won’t, Mary’s, etc are a struggle, as you have to press space after ', otherwise you’ll get canť, wonť, Maryś, etc. ...

Google Now is finally available for iOS since earlier this week. But for those using Google Apps for Business will receive an annoying “your administrator hasn’t enabled Google Now for your domain”. Fear not, the solution is easy. You just have to enable Google Now, which is buried under Setting / Mobile / Android Setting / Enable Google Now. For detailed instructions, check Scott Hanselman’s tutorial, which has fancy pictures and all the details. ...

I hope this will be my last post about Synology for a while. After dealing for a few weeks with an unstable environment, then hacking a serial console to troubleshoot, then cracking the secret recovery telnet password just for fun, and finally solving the weird mistery of SSH not accepting /bin/bash as default shell, I thought I finally had a stable environment. Wrong. But this time I was the one to blame. After solving the conflict with bash, I changed /etc/passwd user shell to /bin/bash. The only problem is that Synology wipes the system partition during firmware upgrades, so when I upgraded to DSM 4.1.2668, my custom `/bin/bash``was gone. Of course this locked me out of the system. No SSH, SCP or FTP. Great. ...

Trying to use a non-standard shell in your Synology DS212+ NAS may be an exercise of frustration. I’m a bash-lover, and have a bunch of scripts to automate backups, so I wanted to set up default shell to /bin/bash. It worked well with root, but when a regular user tries to log in, the connection is terminated with “Permission denied, please try again.”. Weird. Maybe /etc/shells? Nops. Maybe sshd_config? No. PAM modules, then? Also not. I even tried compiling bash from source (which took me a full day, just to get ARM GCC to cross compile properly). Nada. ...

If you have a Synology NAS and had some sort of disk crash in the past, you’ve probably encountered the famous “Cannot format system partition” and “Please configure your router to forward port 23 to DiskStation and contact Synology online support”. Yeah, it sucks. It sucks even more when you know the disk is perfectly fine, and you still have hopes to recover your data. Or you simply don’t like the idea of having your port 23 open to the world for god-knows-how-long until a Synology tech support can look into your case. ...

I thought I’d post this here for anyone looking for help on troubleshooting a failed Synology Diskstation NAS. I’ve been a happy user of a Synology DS-212+. The software is robust and much better than my old DroboFS, and the fact that it is entirely open source is a big plus. I recently upgraded the firmware to DSM 2661. Everything worked fine. For 12 hours. The next morning, the device was dead, with the blue blink of death). ...

FileZilla is great, but the default configuration is to save all configuration files & sites to local folders. Here’s an elegant solution to change the default directory. Just copy fzdefaults.xml.example from [FileZilla's install dir]/docs and place it in: Linux/BSD: ~/.filezilla Mac OSX: Contents/SharedSupport/ Windows: put in same directory as filezilla.exe Alternatively you can also point to a shared folder on Dropbox, and share your config and sites across multiple computers. Just make sure you have a strong password on Dropbox, for obvious reasons. ...