A great product on Windows; But Needs Help on Linux — If you’ve ever used Chrome Remote Desktop with Windows and Android devices, it works great. All your computers are listed, performance is good, and it works well — at least, as well as you can expect if you are using a phone. But if you are using a laptop or…

Maybe you don’t use Activities because you can’t make them do what you want — In a previous Medium post, I talked about how to use a KDE activity to automatically launch a VirtualBox Windows image and pause it when you go to another activity. That’s a great way to use an activity, but there was one thing that bothered me: the way I did…

A few things you probably aren’t using in Konsole — If you are like me, you spend a lot of time in a terminal and for KDE users, that usually means Konsole. Here are a few features you might not know about, that can make your Konsole experience better. Profiles Sure, you know about profiles. That’s how you set the color…

Keep your shell environment across multiple machines — If you are a heavy user of bash on Linux, you probably have a large startup script with all your favorite aliases, PATH settings, and tools setup like fzf, emacs, etc. But there’s a problem. When you make that one last tweak towards perfection on your desktop computer, you still…

Windows when you want, low impact when you don’t — Steve Martin has a famous comedy bit about “How to be a millionaire and never pay taxes.” It starts out, “First… get a million dollars, then…” That’s kind of how this post is going to be. I’m assuming you already run Windows in VirtualBox or some other virtualization software. If…

Plan, Test, Build GUIs, and Compile! If you are writing a shell script for yourself, that’s pretty easy. You’ll remember if you need to not have spaces in file names and you know all the programs your script needs are in place and the correct version. But if you are…

Well… mostly portable — Writing bash scripts to do something is fairly easy. But sometimes the hardest part is getting data to and from the user. Normal people dislike the command line (don’t ask me why) but rolling a GUI program is a pain if all you want to do is a little script. …

Run once, run often… — Most of the time, having a computer do more than one thing at a time is a good thing. But if you write shell scripts, you’ll eventually write something that should only run one copy at a time. For example, I have a script that mounts some remote directories when…

Who wins the Internet race? — Hypothetical situation: you are about to send a file remotely to the cloud (wherever that is). You have a choice of two servers, but you don’t know which one to pick. The truth is, that’s a complicated question and there are many ways you could profile it. However, one simple…