TL;DR: I turned off swap on my machine and it’s been fine. I haven’t been able to find clear guidance on whether I should use swap or not on my machine, and if so, how much to set. There are some arguments in favor of using swap that I’ve not been able to fully understand, […]

The “Huion Kamvas Pro (2019)” comes with 16 physical buttons and two touch strips along the sides of the tablet. On Windows, you can configure the buttons to send custom keystrokes (e.g. toggling painting tools or changing brush size). However, the key mapping is mirrored from the left to the right side, so you can […]

Summary: By taking advantage of AWS spot instances and only running when you need to, you can have a powerful Minecraft server for as little as a couple dollars per month. I’m happy to share a set of tools we’ve created to run a cheap, personal Minecraft server on AWS! It works like this: When […]

I went to a boarding school for part of high school. (It was actually a public boarding school—weird, huh?) We lived in an old college dorm that had four floors. I lived on the 4th floor and one particular friend lived on the 1st floor. Our Internet connection on the 4th floor (and actually most […]

We have a Bluetooth speaker in our office that we often use to play music through. My Linux machine, however, didn’t automatically connect to the Bluetooth speaker, and even after connecting it, I’d have to switch the output to be that speaker. I ended up creating a shortcut on my menu bar that would connect […]

Heroku is trialling new pricing levels for their dynos. Here’s the verbatim text they gave: Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM. Hobby – […]

We had a hardware unit that was Ethernet enabled. To configure and manage it, the vendor provided us with a Windows program that, given the unit’s IP, could establish a TCP connection to the unit’s port 3300 and do all of its fancy management things. The only problem was, the hardware unit was a hundred […]

The new version of HipChat added support for video and screen-sharing. It also introduced the new requirement of OpenGL 2.0. On my computer, HipChat would crash on startup with repeated messages of [code] can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection [/code] I […]

GitHub repo: https://github.com/erjiang/tuntuntun (proof of concept status) I was trying to play Minecraft by tethering over a Sprint data connection but was having awful random latency and dropped packets. The Sprint hotspot seems to only allow a limited number of connections to utilize the bandwidth at a time – a download in Chrome would sometimes […]

I wanted to get a pile of jpegs organized by the year, and then the day. For example, IMG00001.JPG would go in 2013/06-04 based on its EXIF creation date. The handy exiftool can do this, via its own virtual “Directory” tag. The “Directory” tag is not an actual EXIF tag, but exiftool will move the […]