A dark day for consumer rights: Right to repair bill killed in Canada thanks to corporate lobbying
When Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux Kernel in 1991 or Ian Murdock first released the Debian OS in 1993, talking about the “openness” of a PC or the “right to repair it” would have been a laughable affair! 8086 was an open standard then (just as standards should be) and...
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Foxy firefighters and the clash between individual and collective liberalism
The biggest speculation in the tech industry these days concern net neutrality and the last week was no different. Whilst I’m happy that TRAI is clear on upholding the net neutrality in my own country, India, the clouds of doom could be clearly seen in USA as the FCC is...
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Docker trick: running containers efficiently using a bash script
One of the basic problems with running a docker image is that its too easy to spew up multiple instances or containers of the same image. Consider running the following container for instance: docker run -it -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="test" -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="test" \ --net=host "prahladyeri/testimage:latest" /bin/bash This will start a fresh container...
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Performing a little usability tweak on the XFCE window recycler in greybird theme
Xubuntu is my favorite distro, hands down and the default Greybird theme is just wonderful! There used to be a time when I liked Ubuntu-MATE too, but not so much since they took the road to GTK+3! Coming back to the topic, XFCE works great but it has a small...
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Linux DIY: Creating a multiboot USB drive with ISO images of multiple distros
Though I’m not a distro-hopper exactly, I keep trying live versions of popular linux distros like debian and ubuntu every now and then, and while I generally use the “dd” command which works right out of the box, today I thought that instead of burning a new ISO image each...
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Windows recipe: How to quickly track your active network connections using resmon utility
Windows 10 is a great operating system when its clean and well-maintained but once you start cluttering it with more and more apps, your Internet speed typically starts to slow down and it becomes increasingly difficult to find out which background app is consuming your bandwidth. One way of tackling...
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Userscript recipe: Adding auto-refresh button to gmail classic
Call me old, but I much prefer the older classic GMail interface to the modern bloated one. Not only is the classic version less bandwidth consuming, but also simplistic in nature with just the buttons and tools that we need. I somehow don’t like it when zillions of AJAX scripts...
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Beware of Uber's vomit fraud when booking a cab next time
According to some recent reports by top technology blogs, Uber drivers have been reportedly engaging in an activity called “vomit fraud”. Basically, Uber (and many other cab services too) allow their drivers to collect a fine of up to $150 if their customer creates a mess in the cab (such...
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XFCE panel indicator plugin background fix
The indicator plugin in XFCE panel has been a very useful but also a very controversial plugin! The reason is that its the only plugin on the XFCE panel developed in GTK3 (whereas rest of the panel is developed in GTK2) and this causes some theming issues. Specifically, only those...
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How to make your Xubuntu 16.04 desktop look and behave like Ubuntu-MATE
Xubuntu is one of the most popular among the “lighter” distros as it hardly consumes 200MB when idle and even older machines are able to run with acceptable performance. Ubuntu-MATE which is based on MATE Desktop (a GNOME-2 fork) is also a similar competing distro though its debatable whether its...
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