NuPhy Halo96 function keys on Linux

The NuPhy Halo96 mechanical keyboard is an amazing keyboard, but it has a small issue when used with Linux (I encountered it with Rocky Linux and Fedora, but it is reported with other distro as well, like Ubuntu). The issue is related to function keys (F1, F2, …, F12) not being accessible (they only provide the “multimedia” functionalities). Luckily there’s an easy fix, but unfortunately this is not documented, nor easily found on the internet, so I decided to write this post with the hope to make this more reacheable in case someone needed this information....

March 2, 2024 · 1 min · Fepede

Getting rid of YouTube Music and other annoying music players on Android (and Linux Desktop).

During 2020 Google shutdown its music service Google Play Music and the related Android App, and forced its users to migrate to YouTube Music. YouTube Music, as well as its competitor Amazon Music, are super annoying and keep asking to upgrade to their premium service. Moreover, managing the music library is cumbersome and often (as it happened to me several times) the music library is modified by the service owner....

December 8, 2020 · 2 min · Fepede

Enable hotspot with MVNO operators on Google Pixels

Recently I bought a Google Pixel 3a phone. It worked nicely until I had to use the tethering feature (also called hotspot): it didn’t work at all. Basically, this function allows you to use your phone as a WiFi hotspot to allow accessing the Internet from other devices (tablet, laptop and whatnot). I tried replacing my SIM with ones of other operator and everything worked as expected. I then tried moving my SIM to other phones and it worked as well....

June 21, 2019 · 2 min · Fepede

CentOS 7 permanent systemd log

One of the most annoying thing about CentOS 7 (actually, one of the very few annoying things) is the default configuration involving systemd journal logs. The default is indeed to clear the whole log on every boot. If you’d like to preserve the journal (to being able to see what happened before the system reboot) you just need to edit the file /etc/systemd/journald.conf and in the section [Journal] change the value of the Storage entry from auto to persistent....

November 20, 2017 · 1 min · Fepede

A GNOME Shell extension to tell whether GNOME is running under Xorg or Wayland

Since the release of Fedora GNU/Linux 25 in November 2016, Wayland has become the default choice for Gnome Shell sessions (where supported by the underlying hardware stack). Altough GNOME Shell under Wayland works very well (actually, better than under Xorg), it is sometime required (or preferred) to run Xorg instead (ie, some applications requires Xorg, for example TeamViewer). So, I often wondered whether I was running Wayland or Xorg. Since I’m lazy I developed a very simple GNOME Shell extension which does exactly that....

April 19, 2017 · 1 min · Fepede

Managing systemd-journald disk usage

This is the first blog post of a series talking about systemd. This serie will shows some useful commands for common scenarios. This post is about managing the disk space used by journald. systemd-journald is the systemd component who takes care of logging all system and unit’s messages. It typically stores its files in /var/log/journal/<id>/ , where your id is something like d705e54557314d359c077214ebf789d6. Go and check how much space it is used there:...

October 1, 2016 · 2 min · Fepede

Analyze Tomcat logs with GoAccess

GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems.` It also can generate nice looking HTML reports. I use it to analyze Tomcat servers logs and it works great. If you’re running Fedora or RHEL/CentOS with EPEL repository enabled you can easily install it with a simple: yum install -y goaccess Next step is configure Tomcat to generate a suitable log file....

May 12, 2016 · 2 min · Fepede

La naskiĝo de nova vorto

Kiam ni parolas esperante, ni kutimas crei novajn vortojn. Tiele ne okazas kiam ni uzas nian gepatran lingvon. Se vi havas italajn konatojn en via sociaj retoj, verŝajne lastatempe vi legis ion pri la vorto “petaloso”. Tiu vorto – kiu oni povas diri esperante “petalplena” – ne eksistas en la Itala vortaro. Ĉi tio estas bela rakonto pri la naskigo de nova vorto en la itala lingvo ke tute rapide “virusiĝi”....

March 1, 2016 · 3 min · Fepede

Deduplicating Maven, Gradle and IDE’s JAR files on BTRFS

If you are a Java (or a Groovy) developer, your home directory will probably contains (at least) some GBs of downloaded JAR files. Every dependency management tool (and IDE) downloads its own copy of the JAR files he need in a different directory. This lead to the situation where you might have several copies of the same file wasting your precious disk space! In such situation one can take advantage of one of the nicest features of the BTRFS filesystem: deduplication....

December 22, 2015 · 2 min · Fepede

Spring Integration – FTP files not reprocessed and broken flow

In the last years I’ve done everything I could to avoid using FTP as a mechanism to pass data from one procedure to the other inside our company. Tools such Spring Integration and RabbitMQ helped me a lot in this process (making my life so much better) However we still have to use FTP as exchange mechanism with several external partners. Spring Integration has a wonderful FTP module that covers all of my needs, however I found a case which required me some googling to shed light on....

August 8, 2015 · 3 min · Fepede