Building an RSS reader must be some kind of rite of passage. Everybody has probably started one at one point. (Hey, I've done it too.) It seems easy enough, right? Unfortunately, it is pretty easy to get something sort-of working. Which means that there's a lot of junk ...

I recently needed a way to test if packets were reaching a linux device I'm testing. The device didn't have tcpdump installed, so I didn't have a real sniffer. Fortunately all I really needed was confirmation that packets were arriving. iptables to the rescue! Assuming there are ...

When you install i3 on Ubuntu via apt-get install i3-wm, it should come with dmenu, but it doesn't.

Dmenu is a handy launcher that you can (by default) invoke with mod-d, then start typing the command you want to run (with dynamic completion) and press enter when the command ...

The default i3 config file only has commands to move to a specific numbered workspace (e.g. mod-1, mod-2). For better or worse, I'm in the habit of "traveling" through the workspace list using Ctrl-Alt-Up and Ctrl-Alt-Down (or Left and Right, if you prefer a horizontal feel for your ...

As I mentioned in the last post, I've switched to the i3 window manager. After fixing the Caps Lock key, the next order of business is getting the audio keys on my multimedia keyboard to control audio output. (It's nice to be able to quickly mute or pause ...