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Hidden files from file managers, thumbnail creation and applications can be very annoying, especially because they stay forever. In most ".gitignore" files at least the ".DS_Store" (MacOS finder) is listed, but what about all the other hidden Linux application files?

The AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper CPU is, thanks to the enormous core count, perfect for virtualization. By passing an graphic card to the VM it's possible achieve almost bare metal GPU performance, which is important for gaming or the use of graphical intensive software (like Adobe Photoshop).

In the past BIOS updates often required Windows or booting from a stick. Thankfully with the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 and the almost identical ThinkPad X1 Extreme, you can update the BIOS directly from Linux.

In Sway, the wayland version of i3-gaps, regular x11 screenshot tools, like maim are not working. Thankfully there are some alternatives to consider.

The Sony MDR-1000X and it's successors the WH-1000XM2 and WH-1000XM3 are some of the best bluetooth headphones out there. With it's easy to use integrated touch pad on the right side and the great noise cancelling they are an ideal daily driver at the office. Using them on Linux is quiet straight forward with some caveats on high quality audio.

There are multiple solutions capturing GIFs under Linux and I tried a lot. Most have usability issues, produce way to large output files or don’t even allow to grab a rectangle. As I am using i3 wm, it also needs to be able to be started via a shortcut without any GUI software.

The ThinkPad P51 is Lenovo’s top workstation model with 15 inch. You get the strongest mobile Intel Kaby-Lake-CPUs (up to Intel Xeon CPUs) and an Nvidia Quadro up to an M2200 in a military tested case.

The Lenovo Yoga X1 with the OLED display is a great linux laptop, but there are some things that can be quite tricky. When you rotate the Lenovo Yoga X1, you need also adjust the Touchscreen and Pen Input Matrix (Two devices). There are two different drives available for the touchpad, libinput or evdev. Personally i prefer libinput as it just seems to work more precise and reliable.

Sometimes it’s useful to backup only files in an folder (and subfolders) that have been changed in the last 7 days.

For this you can use find and tar:

find . -mtime -7 -print | xargs tar cvzf "backup-$(date +%y-%m-%d).tar.gz"

If you only want to backup certain file types you can extend the fin...

If you navigate a lot on the terminal there are some little helpers that can make your life easier. One particular unknown is the d command in the zsh.

d shows you the folders you recently navigated to, such as:

0 ~/projects/docker/systemtests
1 ~/projects
2 ~/srv
3 ~/projects/ansible/update...