With the recent upgrade of Xfce4 4.20, I was facing the font size issue on my laptop. I am using icewm . And the upgrade causes my fonts become too small. But some applications are too big, like Brave and FreeFileSync. I spent some time to fix this. And this is my final solution,

Allow xfsettingsd at startup,

xfsettingsd --daemon -D

And use xfce4-appearance-settings, at the Fonts > DPI, enable Custom and set the value to 120 as in .Xresources . The effect is immediate. This solves the font size for all applications.

Due to the recent upgrade of Linux kernel to 6.11.4, my bluetooth mouse (Logitech M590) cannot connect. I tried many times, and sometimes I can connect, but most of the time it fails. There were several related posts: here and here.

Since my storage doesn’t have enough space to install Linux LTS, I can only wait for the fix from Linux. While waiting for the fix, I remembered that M590 allows to use a USB receiver. As a result, I installed ltunify package and now it works. The only drawback is that one of my USB ports is occupied.

I am using an Android phone, specifically Vivo. I found that when I play the MOV video transferred from iOS, only sound is able to be played properly but the picture is not showing.

None of the solutions from the Internet helped me to solve my problem. After trial and error, I found that the MOV file can be converted to MP4 format using ffmpeg with some parameters. Eg,

fmpeg -i input.MOV -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -vf "scale=720:1280,fps=29" -ac 1 -x264opts "ref=0:cabac=0:b_pyramid=0:bframes=0" -profile:v baseline -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

Based on my experience, the most crucial parameter is “-pix_fmt yuv420p”, so the MP4 video is 8-bit depth.

Bye-bye Openbox, welcome IceWM.

Due to the recent upgrade of glib2 on Arch Linux, it crashes my Openbox when I am running Wine or Proton. Downgrade to 2.74.6 is not a solution, because Nemo, Caja, Nautilus are using 2.76.0.

As a result, I have to find an alternative. From Wikipedia, I found that LXDE can be configured with other window manager rather than Openbox, eg Fluxbox, IceWM, or Xfwm.

I tried Xfwm, but it fails to run. Probably needs extra configuration, but I didn’t continue trying. I tried Fluxbox long time ago, can’t remember the feature. Then I found that, compare to Openbox, IceWM is still in development. Hence I decided to try IceWM.

Recently I was doing online booking using Malaysia Airlines (MAS). In summary, the experience is too bad.

• I cannot login using GMail with password.

• Sending email as feedback to get support, but never get reply.

• Passenger name cannot be too long. Need to use initials.

• The first name and last name is super weird. The last name suppose to be family name. For Chinese with Christian name, such as James Wong Hang Seng, the family name is Wong, the last name suppose to be Wong, but the instruction says to fill the last name as James Wong. This doesn’t make any sense.

I like to use Twitter, but the new Topics and Interests feature of Twitter is damn annoying. It keep showing something I am not interested of.

I looked for the solution from Internet, and finally I come out with this bookmarklet, which can be used in Settings > Privacy and Safety > Content You See > Interests.

javascript:(async()=>{const sleep=ms=>new Promise(r=>setTimeout(r,ms));const inputs=document.querySelectorAll('section[aria-label="Section details"] input:checked');for(let i=0;i<inputs.length;i+=1){const rand=Math.floor(Math.random()*2e3);await sleep(9e3+rand);const input=inputs[i];input.click()}})();

After trigger the bookmarklet, just leave the page there, it will slowly deselect one by one.

I was using Dell Vostro 5459 previously. However, it has some hardware deficiencies. The battery capacity keeps dropping drastically within a year. That’s a very bad experience. Now, the fully charged battery is only 1% of the designed capacity. Then I purchased an external power bank from Dell. But that’s not an ideal design for a laptop that you need to bring extra gadget to everywhere, and charging external battery is too troublesome.

I faced the login issue with Evernote since around two weeks ago. It leads me to a blank page, with the HTTP status code 418. There is similar issue reported here. I made the bug report, but the issue not yet solved. Looks like it happened in Malaysia and Vietnam according to the forum. Suggested solution in the forum was to use VPN.

This is how I solved the issue as a temporary solution to login.

I am in dilemma of choosing Brave or Chromium as my default browser.

The following is my comparison,

I am still continue using Brave, because I prefer Brave over Firefox on Android. In order to conform with Brave on Android, I choose Brave on desktop.

In my previous post, I mentioned I migrated Wunderlist to Microsoft To Do.

However, there are two annoying things. Firstly, do not expect there will be Chrome App version of Microsoft To Do similar to Wunderlist and Google Keep, because Chrome Apps is going to be discontinued.

Secondly, I frequently experienced To Do web page doesn’t load properly, either stuck at the loading page, or the tasks not showing or showing partially.