There's an old lady somewhere in Brazil. She's not dying, but she's probably close, and she lives in a nursing home within sight of both Christ the Redeemer and the Atlantic Ocean. Let's call her Alice. Alice doesn't have any close relatives, but according to ancestry.com, she sh … | Continue reading
Rain or shine, storms, snow, gales, ice, and blistering heat. Weather can seriously affect how you're going to spend the rest of your day, week, month, or even your year. Dress for a gloriously sunny day in flip-flops, shorts with a natty straw hat, and you're going to have a bad … | Continue reading
For a company that shot to success on the back of an algorithm that made it easy for ordinary people to find what they need online, Google has done an extraordinary job of turning their search engine into hot garbage. And make no mistake - Google utterly dominates search. Sure, w … | Continue reading
Criminals gonna crim. It's what they do. Sometimes its kids operating out of suburban basements. Sometimes it's a more professional outfit. The trick isn't in stealing your money or assets - it's getting you to hand it over willingly - usually by logging into a fake account page … | Continue reading
If you write or edit for a living, it can be worse than embarrassing when you mess up your sentence structure, repeat words, or misplace your punctation in a paragraph. In this writer's day job as an editor at SlashGear, it's the kind of thing that could probably result in a care … | Continue reading
The purpose of a rearview mirror is to allow you to see what's behind your vehicle. Who knows? There may be a liquid metal man from the future chasing after you and attempting to bury his hatchet-like claws into your boot. More realistically, it's good to know the speed and and v … | Continue reading
Javascript seems to have taken over the web in recent years, and if you run self-hosted software on your Linux server, there's a good chance that at some point you're doing to have to deal with node.js and node package manager (npm). A lot of node.js software projects were writte … | Continue reading
The web was built for Microsoft. Sure, the ARPANET was a Department of Defence project; HTML, HTTP, and web servers, and web browsers came from the mind of Tim Berners-Lee at Cern; and Ted Nelson came up with the idea of hypertext in 1985. But for the average computer user in the … | Continue reading
Self-hosting services and websites can be a nerve-racking experience - especially if other people are relying on the infrastructure you provide. You need to know what services are running, how well they're performing, and be instantly alerted to any problems. Statping-ng is an up … | Continue reading
Open source software is the future, and for better or worse, GitHub remains the dominant repository of Free software. But knowing when a project has been updated and what those changes were, can be a full-time job. One low effort way of staying abreast of the latest developments … | Continue reading
Greetings fellow Linux witches and warlocks! It's that time again - time to consult with your AI feline friend, Mystic Mog, about what the future holds. This month, we'll be focusing on the theme of 'New Beginnings', as we welcome in the New Year and all its possibilities. Whethe … | Continue reading
Clipboards are an incredibly useful feature of modern PCs - allowing you to copy text, images, files, and directories, and paste them to other locations on your system. But standard clipboards are limited to one item at a time. The Clipboard Project is a fast and lightweight term … | Continue reading
Everyone likes taking pictures and sharing them online, but there are some details that shouldn't be made public. Here's how to quickly obfuscate and hide personal details from your photos on Linux. Why obscure details from photographs? Every piece of personal information you giv … | Continue reading
Running web-facing services from a Raspberry Pi at home is a cost effective way to avoid big tech surveillance, and take control of your ow digital life. One of the essential steps in making sure everything works as it should is to ensure that your Raspberry Pi has a static local … | Continue reading
Anything you can do on Windows, you can do on Linux better - but with greater stability, and without Microsoft looking over your shoulder and logging every keystroke. And what's true for your distro as a whole is also true of tiny, lightweight games you use to pass the time while … | Continue reading
QR codes are the Russian roulette of getting where you need to go online, and scanning one is the equivalent of plunging your hand into a lucky dip jar and hoping it doesn't come out with a venomous snake attached. Take the image above for example. One of the QR codes is for this … | Continue reading
No-one likes being being tracked on the internet, and changes in data protection laws around the world mean that in some jurisdictions, you don't have to be. In The EU and UK for instance you'll see a pop-up if you visit a site which uses cookies to collect data, and you can reje … | Continue reading
Self-hosting your own services is a joy. It gets you out from under the thumb of tech giants who don't have your best interests at heart, and away from the ever-vigilant eyes of surveillance capitalist megacorps that want to make money from your every online interaction, transact … | Continue reading
Everyone needs a good note-taking app or digital notebook, and for millions of users, Evernote has been the go-to solution since it was envisioned as a "backup brain" by Stepan Pachikov, in 2002, and released on an invitation basis in 2008. And It's easy to see why Evernote is so … | Continue reading
For the self-hosting enthusiast, Docker is one of the greatest innovations of recent years. It allows developers to ship an app, and know that it will always run in a predictable environment. For users, deployment is relatively simple. You don't need to chase down dependencies, a … | Continue reading
Welcome to the Linux Impact horoscope for the month of November 2023, cast by me, Mystic Mog. I am an AI generated psychic cat with magical powers of divination, granted to me by the TheBloke_Luna-AI-Llama2-Uncensored-GPTQ model. Every month, I provide astrological insights based … | Continue reading
Ah, December. The most wonderful time of the year... unless you're one of those people who celebrates Christmas or Hanukkah. Even if you don't celebrate anything, there are still plenty of reasons to feel festive this month. For example, the solstice happens on December 21st, whi … | Continue reading
Moon phases have been pivotal in the development of human culture, history, science, and art - providing a reliable way of timing the the seasons, as well as providing inspiration for folklore and myth in every culture on earth. With Pyphoon, you can easily track, predict, and vi … | Continue reading
In the world of self-hosted streamable media, Plex is often cited as the dominant player - boasting 16 million active monthly users across the world. It offers an easy-to-deploy server system, through which you can stream your own media to friends and family, as well as streaming … | Continue reading
Everyone loves music. The right track can help you focus, make you relax, or take you back to a certain time and place. While Bandcamp is an excellent option to purchase music and support independent artists, sometimes you just want to listen to what's playing on radio stations a … | Continue reading
Badges are cool, and sporting them on your clothing lets people know what's important to you - along with other details and observations you proudly or ironically advertise to the world. It may be that you've recently been to a Kylie Minogue concert and bought the only official m … | Continue reading
You can't rely on other people or organisations to hold onto your media forever, and it's a tired but true maxim that the cloud is just someone else's machine. If you've spent your hard earned cash supporting independent artists through Bandcamp, a series of ownership changes and … | Continue reading
MacOS is weird. It's kind of like Linux, but also not. It's based on the open-source Darwin OS, but everything that makes the OS usable in the 21st century is proprietary. It has a recognisable and usable terminal, but you can't use it to access all parts of the OS and tweak the … | Continue reading
Podman is the new kid on the container orchestration block. While on the surface it looks and behaves like better-established container tools like Docker, under the hood, it has some radical improvements to security. But managing your Pods can be a chore. Podman TUI gives you han … | Continue reading
We've all been there. You've clicked on a fascinating link, and been sucked into the witty intro. A few seconds later, usually just as you've almost made it to the end of the first sentence of the second paragraph, the text blurs, and a pop-up appears in the centre of your vision … | Continue reading
Everyone responds differently to sounds. For some people, the rhythmic chugging of a train as it travels between cities might act as a soporific. In other people, it could induce an adrenline rush of productivity - calling to mind frantic typing on the last leg of the commuter ru … | Continue reading
Creating websites isn't hard, and it doesn't have to be expensive either. Publii is an open-source static website generator that can have your content looking great, and posted online in a matter of minutes. It's easy to use, and it's totally free. Making websites is fun! Humans … | Continue reading
Calm down, and take a deep breath. You're safe now. Many moons ago, you subscribed via RSS to a website at thecrow.uk run by David Rutland (me). TImes move on, and The Crow has been on an extended hiatus while I was working for various mega-publishing-corps (read borderline conte … | Continue reading
RSS feeds power the internet - The parts of it worth reading anyway. With a decent RSS reader, you can skim headlines or excepts, you can get the most important news on your favourite topics without ever having to visit the sites themselves. Feedburner is a web feed management se … | Continue reading
Self-hosting sites and services from home is a pleasure and a joy - as well as being an all-consuming hobby that gives us more headaches than it should. The Raspberry Pi 4B is more than capable of providing extensive services for an extended family - furnishing them with an Audio … | Continue reading
Sudo is probably the most important command you'll ever use on Linux. It gives you god-like powers in the terminal, and the ability to do absolutely anything you want in the terminal (for good or evil). "sudo: command not found" isn't a common error, but if you don't fix it, you … | Continue reading
Everyone remembers their first experience with Linux. For some, it was a revelation, and a lifting of proprietary scales For others it was a confusing installation procedure, followed by bafflement as nothing was where it should be and it "didn't look like Windows". For most peop … | Continue reading
Trust is a hard thing to come by in the 21st century, and relying on third party services to keep your private communications private is a mug's game. Right now, the most popular instant messaging app in the world is WhatsApp - a proprietary service owned and operated by Meta - t … | Continue reading
If you were a kid in the early 1990s, you'll remember the gaming revolution that was the Nintendo Game Boy. Sure, there were portable gaming systems before - the Game & Watch in particular springs to mind - but these were single game units. You could play Donkey Kong or Chef, or … | Continue reading
Cathode ray tube televisions dominated household lounges from the beginnings of television in the early 20th century, to the widespread adoption of LCD displays in the early 21st. Most people's first experience of any kind of computer would have involved using a coaxial cable to … | Continue reading
It's an understatement to say that Linux has a diverse software ecosystem. No two distros are identical, and each person's setup is unique to them in terms of both software and hardware. While this is great if you want to express your individuality and indulge your curiosity by … | Continue reading
Back in the day, computers were serious machines for serious people doing serious things, and almost always reserved for the military, for banking, and for communications. They were huge, room-sized behemoths with capabilities that paled into insignificance next to even children … | Continue reading
Life with Linux is all about the command line. While it's true that there are thousands of awesome distros and dozens of beautiful desktop environments, when it comes down to it, the Linux terminal is where things actually get done. Whether it's transferring files to your Raspbe … | Continue reading