I was walking home yesterday and I just happened to come across an HP LaserJet p2035n sitting by the dumpster, waiting to be taken away. I've never owned a printer, but this thing looked like it came from an era when such devices were made to be reliable instead of forcing DRM-locked cartridges, so I picked it up and took it with me. After getting situated I started some online research and I figure this brand of printers was manufactured from about 2008-2012, and my printer has a 2012 date.

As it turns out, this tossed printer works perfectly fine. I plugged it into power and ran a test sheet, and it prints almost perfectly. I plugged it via USB-B into my PC running Fedora 41 and immediately it gets picked up and added as usable printer. I then plugged the printer into its Ethernet port and fortunately this thing is new enough to have Bonjour (i.e. mdns) services so once again my PC just immediately finds it and can print. Awesome!

My laptop is a MacBook. While it did detect the printer over the network, it couldn't add the printer because it couldn't find a driver to operate it. I honestly don't understand why that's a problem since I assume macOS also uses CUPS just like Linux. But at any rate, I found the solution:

With CUPS on Linux I can share the printer. After configuring firewall-cmd to allow the ipp service now my iPhone and my MacBook can also print to the shared printer using the generic PostScript driver. So, in conclusion, Linux helped me 1) use this printer with no additional effort of installing drivers, 2) share this printer to devices which were not plug-and-play ready, and 3) print pics of Goku and Vegeta. As always, I love Linux.

I disable animations either through Gnome's accessibility setting or KDE's slider to instant. I find that Gnome's animations are just too slow by default and KDE's tend to be janky. So while I want my window manager to have instant animations, I don't need my applications to do so.

Is it possible to disable the animations from the DE's settings but to keep them like normal in Firefox? Example: when I press ctrl+t it's OK if the new tab has an animation when it's created in the browser's UI.

I would love a program where I can browse the world and see countries, cities, oceans, all fully labeled (preferably in English which I speak, but a dual English+local native script would also be good). It would be all the nicer if there were stats and facts and some representative photos and stuff to learn a little about different places, without needing to dive into a full Wikipedia article.

Basically, what I'm hoping for is like a modern MS Encarta Atlas, but offline and good.

As for web options, Google Maps, unfortunately, works really well. But I despise Google. OpenStreetMaps doesn't have all that extra data, it is just a map. What are the options available, if any?

When I first set up my web server I don't think Caddy was really a sensible choice. It was still immature (The big "version 2" rewrite was in beta). But it's about five years from when that happened, so I decided to give Caddy a try.

Wow! My config shrank to about 25% from what it was with Nginx. It's also a lot less stuff to deal with, especially from a personal hosting perspective. As much as I like self-hosting, I'm not like "into" configuring web servers. Caddy made this very easy.

I thought the automatic HTTPS feature was overrated until I used it. The fact is it works effortlessly. I do not need to add paths to certificate files in my config anymore. That's great. But what's even better is I do not need to bother with my server notes to once again figure out how to correctly use Certbot when I want to create new certs for subdomains, since Caddy will do it automatically.

I've been annoyed with my Nginx config for a while, and kept wishing to find the motivation to streamline it. It started simple, but as I added things to it over the years the complexity in the config file blossomed. But the thing that tipped me over to trying Caddy was seeing the difference between the Nginx and Caddy configurations necessary for Jellyfin. Seriously. Look at what's necessary for Nginx.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/nginx/#https-config-example

In Caddy that became

jellyfin.example.com {
  reverse_proxy internal.jellyfin.host:8096
}

I thought no way this would work. But it did. First try. So, consider this a field report from a happy Caddy convert, and if you're not using it yet for self-hosting maybe it can simplify things for you, too. It made me happy enough to write about it.

PipeWire 0.3.77 (2023-08-04)

This is a quick bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases.

Highlights

• Fix a bug in ALSA source where the available number of samples was miscaluclated and resulted in xruns in some cases.
• A new L permission was added to make it possible to force a link between nodes even when the nodes can't see each other.
• The VBAN module now supports midi send and receive as well.
• Many cleanups and small fixes.