learnings
I’ve been using Visual Studio Code for all my notes. I have used Typora, Obsidian, and Zetlr, but I keep coming back to VS Code, because of its extensibility, customizability and integrated terminal. Here is how I set it up for note-taking.
You might have read that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). More recent AMD CPUs support Firmware TPM (fTPM) which implements TPM in software on the CPU instead of requiring a dedicated (discrete) chip. This is how I enabled fTPM.
Last month, one morning, my MacBook (still running Catalina) started behaving strangely - though I was not running anything, it was sluggish as the CPU was too busy and the fans were on high. I traced it to the iOS Simulator service that comes with XCode.
I have been too very quiet! I wanted a mash-up of a two Visual Studio Code themes - a light color theme for the main editor area, and a dark theme for the terminal, which I usually keep open. Here is an easy way to achieve this.
When I write, I want proper curly quotes, with the correct opening and closing ‘single’ and “double” quote marks. However, the standard QWERTY keyboard doesn’t have these keys, having only straight 'single' and "double" quotes. Microsoft Office and Apple Pages “Smart Quotes” will automatically fix this, but since I write this blog in Visual Studio Code, here is how I setup my keyboard.
I’ve been meaning to post this from the time I built my Windows desktop. But I keep adding to the list of things I need to configure to get Windows 10 into a ”usable” state for me. Unlike with macOS - for which the default installation is well configured, secure, and pretty much good-to-go - the installation and setup of Windows is extremely painful and a terrible experience. I have to spend hours trying different methods to remove junk, disable telemetry, and secure Windows (and still fail)...
I wanted to turn off my monitor in Windows 10, while listening to music, rather than wait for the Power plan “Turn off the display” timer to kick in. Hmmm, seems Windows has never improved, because I recall having this requirement back-in-the-day - haha, that was during my first project ever, when I was involved in some Win32 development...
Here is how I configure Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I do things a bit strangely: by changing the mounts, by running a GUI Desktop, and by running Docker in WSL2 and not on the Host...
I have been having issues with my Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro - as the notebook heats up, the LCD display starts to die. Initially the display would glitch - black bars or lines of dead pixels would appear at the bottom of the display,. Then these dead portions start to “jump” causing the display to flicker. The glitches progressively affect a larger and larger portion of display, until the display gives up and just just goes blank! Perhaps the flexgate design flaw with the ribbon cable between the motherboard and display...
When I first used Grav, “a modern open source flat-file CMS,” to host this site, I setup a local development environment using macOS’s built-in Apache and PHP. But this is getting harder with each macOS release, so it’s time to use a Docker container instead.
In the Windows 10 Start Menu, I used Pin To Start to a medium sized tile for Firefox - and the icon is nice and large - but is not the case for other shortcuts. I was wondered why... and how to make all the icons have a more consistent look.
There are multiple ways to run Linux GUI applications in a Docker container, but today I’ll highlight a method that I found interesting: using Xpra to forward X11 screens from containers to a web browser. This post is based on Eugene Yaremenko’s docker-x11-bridge, which I simplified.
I’ve been putting of this post for too long. I use Bulma as the CSS framework for this site. I previously used Bulma Customizer to customize some settings but this does not seem to work anymore. So here is how to customize Bulma CSS yourself.
I wanted to re-purpose an old Linksys WRT54GL by overwriting its firmware with the open source DD-WRT firmware, because the original Linksys firmware does not support a wireless repeater setup. A Wireless Repeater is used to “extend” the range of a primary wireless router by connecting a secondary wireless router (i.e. bridging), and routing Internet-bound traffic via the primary router. Here is how I got it working.
I recently posted about configuring RTSS to overlay CPU and GPU information on games in Windows 10. Here is my setup for Cyberpunk 2077, so that I can keep an eye on my framerates (when testing the plethora of graphics settings), CPU / GPU / RAM utilization and temperatures.
I though I’d quickly post my Cyberpunk 20774 settings running on a Nvidia RTX 2060 at 1080p (920×1080). The default Cyberpunk Ray Tracing Medium preset results in low frame rates and rather blur graphics, although all effects are enabled.
Originally written with v1.04, but updated for version 1.05+
Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.
On my new Windows 10 desktop I wanted an on-screen display (OSD) of system performance overlay while gaming - similar those benchmarking videos one finds on YouTube. While I don’t overclock my CPU or GPU, I still do want to know the utilization and temperatures, as these give me a hint as to whether the system is thermal throttled or bottlenecked.
Here is a quick iOS Shortcut to join Cisco WebEx personal rooms by email name. In my organization, once logged in to Cisco WebEx, we can join a colleague’s personal meeting room just by his or her email name. Here is a shortcut to either:
Here is how to create a Docker container on macOS to “compile” Sass stylesheets to CSS. In my case, I wanted to (re)compile my Bulma-based theme with the latest version 0.9.0 with my variable overrides.