Having a home media center is really handy. It can do a ton of things besides just storing and playing your movies and TV series. You can also use them as network-accessible storage or an automated backup system or can even set them up as emulators to play vintage arcade games. The really amazing thing is that you can automate some tasks that you didn't even know wanted to be automated. In this article, we will explore one such automated workflow.
How to free up disk space on Ubuntu when your root partition is almost full
Generally, it is a good idea to have a separate root and home partition, so when you decide to try a new Linux distribution or do a clean install, you can reformat the root partition without losing your personal data. With this method a few years back 8 GB was more than enough for the root partition, but now with the advent of Snap, Flatpak and other alternatives, even a 20 GB root partition can run out of space in a few months. Let's see how to clean up space on a modern Ubuntu-based distribution like Zorin OS or Mint...
11 things to do after installing Zorin OS 16
extremely clean, modern-looking Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. With the 4 different desktop layouts (with 4 more in the Pro version) it will be a familiar experience no matter if your last computer had Windows 7-10-11, macOS, ChromeOS. Version 16 based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS just arrived a few weeks ago and you should really give it a try... and if you do, read on for some tips on how to make an awesome distro even better.
Setting up PIN unlock for Ubuntu Linux
One of the best Windows 10 features is that you can use a PIN to log in faster than typing your password. Of course with Windows Hello you can log in even faster, but fingerprint scanning is often unreliable, and not many laptops have the IR camera required for the facial unlock feature. Wouldn't it be great if you could use a PIN to log in to your Linux desktop too?
Halfway there, still too far away (Weight loss journey 2021)
Back in February this year, I stepped on the scale and realized that I'm heavier than ever. I decided to make a plan to lose weight and to stick to it. To help with accountability I wrote a blog post to publicly announce this and even posted an update later on. It worked amazingly for two and a half months, but after going down from 108kg to almost 96kg something happened that stopped my progress...
Fixing the missing Viber indicator icon from the Cinnamon panel (and possibly other desktop environments)
The software center of Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon Edge offers Viber as a flatpak package. Installation is a breeze and the only downside is that it takes a lot more space than the .deb version from the official Viber homepage. I'm not sure if it is a common problem, but for me, the indicator icon was missing from the cinnamon taskbar.
Software selection for Linux in Q2 2021
With the release of Ubuntu 21.04, official support for fractional scaling was announced. I decided to do a fresh install on my desktop system to check out solely this feature. To speed up the post-install configuration phase and to score an easy blog post, I made a list of the software I use every day.
Analyzing a phishing email that targets cPanel users
I maintain a few websites where the hosting company uses cPanel to provide a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows me to easily manage all aspects of my sites. Today I got an email from cPanel that warned me about reaching the disk quota. This happened before, but something was fishy about the email, so I didn't click on the provided links to fix the problem immediately...
List all enabled products with no images in Magento 2 with this SQL query
Sometimes when you are working on a webstore, your client might ask you totally reasonable questions like how many products have no images uploaded. To answer this question is not so easy when there are 3000+ products in said shop. As the admin interface doesn't provide an easy way to check for thumbnail-less products, I had to turn to some SQL magic to answer the question.
Enabling Numlock and tap to click on the login screen of Zorin OS (and Ubuntu)
I don't have too many pet peeves, but a disabled Numlock is annoying as hell, especially if you type numbers a lot. It is also infuriating if you physically have to click the trackpad instead of just tapping lightly once you got used to this feature in Windows. When I used a Macbook Pro for a few months this has baffled me but I didn't realize you can enable tap to click in system preferences.
