Posts
Make Firefox Disable the Screensaver
After switching back to Firefox for Linux Mint (version 135), I noticed right away that it doesn’t disable the screensaver when watching videos (e.g., YouTube). This appears to be an old problem that was never fixed. It’s a confusing problem on Mint with the Mate desktop, because there are two parts of the screensaver settings in Mate:
March 26, 2025
Enlarging Firefox Bookmark Dialog Box
I recently had to stop using Ungoogled Chromium for various reaasons, the main one being that it no longer worked with YouTube, and the fix for that problem broke other web sites. So I reverted back to Firefox, which is fine (mostly). But one annoying problem is that the dialog box for adding a bookmark is very small, showing only about six rows.
March 4, 2025
Setting Default Browser on Linux
I’ve been using Ungoogled Chromium for quite a while now, but some time in the last few days it stopped played YouTube videos successfully. The symptom was that after 19 seconds, the video would stop playing and a spinner would display forever.
February 27, 2025
Tiny House 4: End Walls
I put up the end walls over the last few days, so the framing is done:
January 22, 2025
Tiny House 3: Posts and Rafters
After I finished installing the floor (2x6 tongue and groove pine), I assembled and installed the five bents (a “bent” is the timber framer’s term for a post/rafter assembly). Here is what it looks like now:
January 18, 2025
Tiny House 2: Floor Boards
I spent a few hours yesterday and today installing floor boards. These are 2x6 tongue and groove pine boards that span the 40 inches between the floor beams. I nailed them to the beams with 6d box nails through the tongues. This way the nails are hidden from view. The smaller nails are necessary to keep the tongues from splitting.
January 10, 2025
Tiny House 1: The Building Bug Bites Again
The little cabin I bought last May is too small to host guests. The only possible space that could have been used for that purpose is taken up by a seven-foot grand piano. You gotta have priorities.
January 9, 2025
Using tesseract with xsane
Xsane is the standard image scanning program for Linux Mint. One useful feature is the ability to convert a scanned image to text. After you scan an image, use “ABCDEF” button in the Viewer to save the image as a text file. By default, Xsane uses a program called gocr to for the OCR conversion. Because I prefer to use tesseract for OCR, I wrote a small wrapper script to emulate the behavior of gocr. Then in xsane Preferences / Setup, in the OCR tab, I changed the OCR command to the full path of my script.
November 9, 2024
Double-Page Mode in Neoreader on Boox Tab X
The Boox Tab X is a large e-ink tablet running Android. It’s a good platform for running Mobilesheets, a very capable sheet music app. But it is also a good platform for reading ebooks, using its built-in Neoreader app. Because the screen on the Tab X is so large (approx. 13 inches), it is practical to view books in Neoreader in double-page mode, simulating the appearance of an open book with two visible facing pages. I first figured out how to enable the double-page view by accident, but immediately forgot how to do it, and spent an embarrassingly long time figuring it out a second time.
October 23, 2024
Blocking Koha Attacks With iptables
Our library’s Koha installation has been subject to unfriendly attacks by servers in China that are apparently associated with Alibaba. The symptom is that Koha becomes very slow, and the top command on the server shows that Koha is using 100% of all CPUs.
April 5, 2024