I've written several BASH scripts that use GNU AWK's printf function to round off decimal numbers. Now I've learned that the rounding is biased, and I need to re-do the scripts. For me the desirable way to round off a decimal is to round up if the bit to be discarded is greater than one half, and…

For those who can't live without screen colour shifting technology such as Redshift or f.lux, myself being one of them, using Wayland did pose the challenge of having these existing tools not working with the Xorg replacement. Thankfully, all is not lost and it is possible even right now. Thanks to…

Eyes hurting at night from the glare of your screen? Perhaps it's even affecting your sleep? Then maybe you should give Redshift a try, a program similar to Twilight on Android and inspired by the likes of f.lux. If you've heard of either Twilight or f.lux, you'll probably know what these sorts of…

Way back in early 2014 I reviewed Act 1 of Double Fine Productions's quirky and colourful adventure, Broken Age. Somewhere along the line I assume I was either hit in the head or started living under a rock (perhaps both), because it wasn't until very recently that I got to playing Act 2. I gave…

If you have a Fitbit fitness device and wish to sync your device using the wireless dongle on your Linux machine, the good news is it is possible with the Bluetooth-based Fitbit devices, thanks to a small Python utility called Galileo. Note: you will need a bit of terminal-foo, but to be honest, I…

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of my personal favourite games of all time. Years ago I would have happily run the game in Linux, but the only real way to do so was through WINE. Thanks to OpenMW, a totally rewritten and open source engine for Morrowind, it is now very much possible to have…

Times have been better, for Boyle Wolfbane. He and his unfortunate but loyal minions, along with his most faithful minion and pet, Fang, tried taking over the world like all of the best and most powerful dark lords do. Emphasis on 'tried', because Boyle failed. Miserably. Aveyond 4: Shadow of the…

SANITY WARNING: Please don't read this article unless you're a compulsive shell scripter, like me. Seriously. There are some excellent FOSS sequence viewers in the distro repositories, with great GUIs and lots of features. Why would you want to build a less capable viewer that only works in a…

If you're a Firefox user and you're a little fed up with going to Google Chrome every time in order to watch Netflix on your Linux machine, the good news is since Firefox 49 landed, HTML5 DRM (through the Google Widevine CDM (Content Decryption Manager) plugin) is now supported. Services that use…

When cleaning UTF-8 text files I sometimes come across invisible characters that I call 'gremlins'. These aren't the usual non-printing characters, like whitespace and (horizontal) tab, which are non-printing characters I expect to find in the plain text files I work with. Gremlins are weird things…

It says here that people 65 and older have poorer vision, poorer dexterity and poorer memory than people 21-55 years old. Sounds right to me. My wife and I are 70, and there's no smartphone in our house because we can't read a smartphone screen easily and an on-screen keyboard is way too small for…