Posts
Using a Raspberry Pi as a USB-tethered Router
For several years, when I was living in rural Vermont in a location that had no wired internet service, I used an Android phone tethered to a Linux laptop via USB. This worked well for that laptop, but I also wanted to share that tethered connection to other machines via Ethernet. I used NetworkManager on the laptop to set the ethernet port to “shared” mode, which effectively turned the laptop into a router running a DHCP server. Recently I tried to duplicate this setup using a Raspberry Pi 4 instead of a laptop, and ran into a problem.
January 8, 2026
Niri Notes
Here are some notes I jotted down while solving some minor problems with Niri , the tiling compositor for Wayland. (I am running Niri on Fedora 43 KDE Edition.) I’ve also included some tips for programs associated with Niri, including fuzzel and waybar.
December 4, 2025
A Weird Cat Problem
No, this post is not about your pet cat barfing on your pillow or eating aloe plants. It’s about a weird problem I ran into using the cat program on Linux, where it failed, complaining that “input file is output file”. This is a problem that almost nobody would ever run into, let alone care about. But I’d seen this several times since I started using Niri , and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
November 12, 2025
ThinkPad T450s Noisy Fan and Thermal Paste
The fan on my main laptop, a ThinkPad T450s, can get pretty noisy at times, especially when watching videos or doing a Zoom call. The CPU temperatures climb up pretty high at the same time, so the fan is trying to do its job. But lately the noise and fan speed were getting annoying. On a Zoom call, the fan was always on high speed and very noisy. I started to wonder if the heat sink/fan assembly wasn’t doing its job well enough.
November 7, 2025
Replacing Joplin with Fossil
For a couple of years, I’ve been using the note-taking app Joplin , and hosting my own WebDAV-based Joplin server. It’s a handy way to keep notes in sync on both Linux and Android. But some recent annoyances have led me to replace Joplin with a Fossil repository.
October 21, 2025
Put Firefox Cache in RAM
The Firefox browser is constantly writing large amounts of data to its cache, which is a concern when your storage device is an SSD. The solution is to put the Firefox cache in RAM. The procedure is much simpler than it is for the Brave browser, because it doesn’t involve using a RAM disk.
October 20, 2025
Using ssh on Termux
Termux is an app that brings a terminal emulator and a full-fledged Linux development environment to Android (version 12 and below). It’s easily installed from F-Droid . But once it’s installed, you will probably want to bring files from your normal Linux machine (say, a laptop) into the Termux environment, or ssh from Termux to another machine, or ssh into Termux from another machine.
September 30, 2025
CapsLock as Ctrl on a Linux server console
The Ctrl key is now universally placed by keyboard manufacturers in the wrong place, on the bottom row. For decades I’ve been tweaking my Linux (and even Windows!) installations to make the CapsLock key act as a Ctrl key, since it’s where the Ctrl key used to be (and should be) before IBM’s bone-headed decision to move it in the late 1980s on their PS/2 computer. This is easily done in the popular desktop environments like Mate and KDE, using their respective keyboard layout configuration tools. But it’s also useful to do the CapsLock-as-Ctrl trick on a server with no GUI, i.e., only a Linux text console.
September 19, 2025
Brave browser download error installing extensions
For some reason, on Fedora 42 KDE, the most recent Brave browser (version 1.82.166) is unable to install extensions from the Chrome Web Store, always giving an error saying “Download error: Download interrrupted.” The workaround solution is to manually load the CRX file for the extension.
September 14, 2025
PATH manipulation in bash
Here are a couple of bash functions to add or remove an entry from the PATH environment variable. Add them to your ~/.bashrc.
September 13, 2025