Four How-Tos

A Friday Hodgepodge

I often come across how-tos that I can't follow up on in the moment. I bookmark them for later. Here are four of them.

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Image by Pop & Zebra, via Unsplash, license.

1. Before we decided to move, I was getting in a good hour-long walk most days, and I often read things from the web during those walks.

Since many web pages are nightmares of poor formatting and blitz visitors with distracting A/V content, I began to wonder if I could use bookmarklets on my phone to fix this, as I do on my "real" computers.

The short answer appears to be that you can, sort of.

We decided to move around the time I learned about this, so the daily walks went out the window and I never got around to trying the advice in "Use Bookmarklets on Chrome on Android," as easy as it seems to be, now that I'm looking at it again:

I was today years old when I learnt that you can find bookmarks via the Address Bar, and they keep the context of the current page. This means that you can run Bookmarklets.

Voila.

Now that I know you can use bookmarklets via the address bar, this opens up a lot of options for slightly deeper customisation on Android than what is possible today.

If I recall correctly, it is possible to insert a title field within the code for a bookmarklet that can facilitate using this method, by serving as a more memorable/typeable search term.

2. Moving along from Android to Linux, I found the following technique to clear out directories more efficiently in a post titled "Unleashing Daily Productivity with Five Shell One-Liners:"

rm !(*.pdf|*.epub)

The above will, for example, remove everything that is not a PDF or an epub file from the current directory.

3. Here's another for Linux, and one that I can personally vouch for.

A little over a year ago, I bought a new laptop, which was mind-blowingly good, except that its battery life was apparently less than three hours. Linux has a reputation for not having great battery life, but I knew that partly came down to people not knowing how to get more out of their systems. And besides, I have a Chromebook that I installed Linux on that can last over eight hours.

So I investigated and very quickly learned that something called "Apport" was chewing up my battery and making my CPU fan wail like a banshee sometimes.

A quick search turned up "How to Disable/Enable Automatic Error Reporting in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS." Yes, Apport is the error reporter for the Ubuntu flavor of Linux. Turning this off immediately helped quiet my computer and reduced its power consumption. (This is running 22.04.)

I turned it off for that computer permanently and it now has a much more tolerable 4-6 hour battery life. Some may sniff at this, but it's good enough for my current purposes.

4. Even if you don't follow the steps in "I'm Now Using the Right Dictionary" -- which shows how to use the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary as the dictionary for the Emacs text editor, you might enjoy or even want to use that dictionary on its own. The link takes you to a sparse page featuring a box in which to type the word you wish to look up.

-- CAV