• 0 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • Windows 10 and 11 really dislike HDDs, that’s probably why you can’t admit to using HDDs online without getting stones thrown at you (I’ve been there before).

    I’ve disabled paging files (= swap) for one of my Windows VMs, unfortunately - to my surprise - that only had a small performance boost, and I still need to let the VM chug for a few mintes before it even lets me open File Explorer.

    … but it does improve performance, definitely consider doing it if you don’t need swap/paging/whatever they call it now.



  • It’s not about the amount of swap space, it’s a problem that happens when swapping happens for big chunks of data at a time.

    Windows aggressively swaps out things way before it’s necessary, you can try increasing the system’s “swappiness”; I’m writing this from my phone, but when I get to my PC I’ll write out how to do it (unless somebody else does it before I do).

    You can set it by writing vm.swappiness=60 in a file like /etc/sysctl.d/50-swappiness.conf.
    The value 60 is arbitrary, if you increase it the system will try to swap out things more aggressively; the name of the file is also partially arbitrary, but AFAIK, it has to begin with two digits — the system will read all the files inside /etc/sysctl.d in order, and the settings in higher-numbered files will be applied over lower ones.

    Officially, this is the explaination of the vm.swappiness parameter.
    You can read and write the value with your shell:

    #!/usr/bin/bash
    sysctl vm.swappiness  # shows you the current value
    sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=69  # sets the swappiness to 69 AND shows you the new value
    






  • I just use Zsh’s command history, coupled with a bunch of functions and aliases to set up different HISTFILE values for different workflows.

    I keep HISTFILEs clean by prepending a whitespace before commands that I don’t want to remember, which unfortunately gave me the habit of doing that on Bash when Zsh isn’t available (which is ineffective at best, and actively annoying at worst).


  • I saved this post hoping for a useful answer, alsa alas, there seems to be none.
    I’m not an audiophile so I’m more or less spreading misinformation, but I think you’re looking to configure ALSA’s device gain rather than going through pipewire.

    kusivittula here mentioned alsamixer, and I found a StackExchange answer saying that you can save its current state using alsactl store (with sudo or write access to /var/lib/alsa/asound.state).
    Alternatively, you can edit /var/lib/alsa/asound.state yourself.

    It doesn’t work if your problem involves audio streams (so *I* am SOL), but making changes through alsamixer seems to lower my headset’s volume so that I can comfortably set it to 100% through wireplumber - I imagine that would also apply to mic gain.




  • Here it is:

    #!/usr/bin/zsh
    
    nl=$'\n'
    dnl=$'\n\n'
    
    url=$1
    msgcontent=$url; shift
    argi=1
    for arg ($@); do
        argi=$(($argi + 1))
        msgcontent=${msgcontent}${nl}Argument\ ${argi}': '${arg}
    done
    
    title="${0:A}"
    msg="An application attempted to open a web page:${dnl}\"${msgcontent}\"${dnl}Copy the URL to clipboard?"
    
    kdialog --title $title --yesno $msg
    answer=$?
    
    if [[ $answer = 0 ]]; then wl-copy $url; fi
    

    If you want to translate it to Bash, keep in mind that arrays behave differently between the two shells, and syntax like for arg ($@); do would likely misbehave or not work at all.

    Also, there’s an issue where some applications do something weird, and the URL seems to be a zero-length argument. I have absolutely no idea what’s up with that.


  • You can set some browser-unrelated program or script as your desktop environment’s default browser, for example I wrote a Zsh script that creates a KDE dialog and asks me to copy the URL to the clipboard.

    I’m not currently at my PC, but if you want it I can paste it in a comment here when I get to it - it shouldn’t be too hard to translate it to Bash, either.

    Other than that? /usr/bin/true is a pretty nice default browser for applications to start without your consent, very minimal and lightweight.