RNNoise provides an excellent Open Source solution for intelligent microphone noise suppression. I’ve found it performs better than other proprietary AI solutions like Nvidia’s RTX Voice and with no visible performance hit. RNNnoise utilizes a neural network and deep learning to provide microphone noise suppression in real-time and it’s easy to setup system-wide on Linux as a pipewire plugin. Let’s get started.
Venerable Slackware, the oldest maintained Linux distribution. For many Linux users it was the one you learned on, yours truly included. I recently felt the nostalgic urge to add Slackware back to my armada of Linuxes on an old IBM Thinkpad T61 (which has one of the best keyboards I’ve ever used on a laptop). Here’s my experiences with Slackware 15.0 in 2023-2024 on older hardware.
I recently had two packages in Fedora whose package GPG keys had changed but dnf would error out and skip them. After some searching I found a simple solution using RPM to remove the old package keys so upon next update I get prompted for the new keys. I write this in hopes it will save others some time.
If you’re looking for a quick, easy way to setup repository-based CI for your Ansible playbooks on Github consider Travis CI, it’s also a breeze to set-up for larger projects and not that involved. This takes around 10 minutes to get in place for Ansible Playbooks, let’s get started. Continue reading
Rofi is a super lightweight window switching and application launcher written entirely in C. It’s totally agnostic to your desktop environment or window manager making it ideal to quickly search for or toggle between open windows and applications and other tasks. It’s become an integral part of my daily workflow. Continue reading
Being a long-time user of OpenVPN and generally liking the security approach of ProtonMail I decided to take ProtonVPN for a test drive. These are my experiences using their Linux CLI and a persistent systemd connection, Mac OSX briefly and IOS. This Swiss-based VPN service provides a free tier and reasonably priced paid plans for more benefits. Continue reading
Over the past year chipping away on the weekends I’ve just published an Ansible video course with Packt Publishing. This is a 2.5hour course split across 6 chapters, focusing on getting up and running quickly with Ansible automation. Check it out!
Besides Btrfs, native Linux-based storage solutions have lagged behind the robustness and features of ZFS and the BSDs. Recently Red Hat acquired Permabit which provides an Open Source device-mapper Linux kernel driver and layer that sits between block devices and filesystems providing deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. Here’s my first experiences setting it up and initial returns using it. Continue reading
Recent versions of Wine can run iTunes and Apple Music for Linux with no wizardry required. Having been given a free Apple Music subscription as part of a family plan it’s useful to have additional streaming media options. Below are the steps to use iTunes on Linux via Wine and have access to iTunes and Apple Music.
Recently Intel started including their graphics drivers into the mainline Linux kernel. This is great except when it stops working. Having suffered intermittent, sporadic GPU freezes on my Lenovo x270 (Kabylake) work laptop since Kernel 4.12+ I came across a bug report that seemed related. Here’s my temporary fix on Fedora 28 for getting things stable again until it’s fixed for good upstream.
In the 2018 race to re-invent AOL instant messenger Signal comes out on top of the competition for end-to-end encryption and a focus on privacy and security. Signal desktop was recently released for Windows, Mac and only Debian-based Linux distributions with no official RPM available. Here’s how to use app sandboxing with Flatpak to get it running nicely. Continue reading
I recently setup Pi-hole on an existing Raspberry Pi running CentOS on my home network to serve as my DNS server and block advertising and unwanted domains for all internet-connected devices. I’m still using an ASUS router with Shibby Tomato firmware for routing, DHCP and private VLANs so I had to make a few changes. This is how I got up and running along with some performance tuning.
The Fedora project COPR service builds/hosts free RPM package repositories and provides useful automation hooks for your Devopsing. You can combine COPR and any standard Git source (Github, Gitlab, etc) with webhooks for automated package builds when your source repository is updated.
Recently the SSD Operating System disk on my primary work desktop failed without warning and no manner of arcane xfsrepair or xfsdump/xfsrestore chicanery would bring it back. Luckily I had SpiderOak backups as my employer offers this as a service to associates. Being the first time I’ve needed to restore data with SpiderOak here’s some things I’ve learned and impressions of the service on Linux.
I wanted all code, system configuration file comments or in-line replies in neomutt email italicised to stand out easier. Many terminal emulators (xterm, xfce4-terminal, iterm2) don’t support [3m and [23m designators for italics but you can use a custom terminfo to do the trick. Here’s how to get it working. Continue reading
Code
hobo.house 