How to Solve Webcam Shenanigans With systemdLast year I talked about my faithful Logitech C930e webcam, and at the end of the article I mentioned that I have to manually disable the autofocus, and that sadly that setting is gone at every reboot, and even every time I unplug the webcam; my question then was, can I automate this somehow?
Ubuntu 5.10 on QEMUFollowing the celebration of my 20 years with Linux, I wanted to recreate the moment I installed Ubuntu “Breezy Badger” 5.10 for the first time, and with QEMU it was quite easy to do on my modern Fedora 44 environment of 2026.
How To Connect Boatswain to OBS StudioI’ve recently got myself an Elgato Stream Deck, and although it doesn’t natively support Linux, there’s a nice app called Boatswain that does the trick (not to be confused with the OCI container monitoring app of the same name).
How to Show Untagged Items in ZoteroI like having my Zotero library tidy and ordered, which means having proper tags for each item that I import, but I was missing an option to quickly list those items without tags.
How to Get a Standing Ovation as a Conference SpeakerI keep on attending otherwise interesting talks and conference sessions being flushed down the toilet by appalling deliveries. This is my plea to you: please, please, PLEASE: if you have to speak in public, follow these rules to ensure a standing ovation at the end of your talk.
How to Install OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 on VirtualBox30 years ago I bought a copy of the recently released IBM OS/2 Warp 3 operating system, and I used it in the primary partition of my computer for a while, until around 1997, when I sold my 486 PC and moved back to Argentina.
How to Add OpenSearch to your WebsiteBack in the days of Web 2.0, before Node.js, before Google Chrome, before Angular and Vue.js, the browser was slowly evolving, and every so often a truly useful feature would show up in the web ecosystem. This was the case of the OpenSearch specification, to allow browsers to search on any website.
How to Create and Read QR Codes on the TerminalHisham recently said something very true: remember when we all silently told ourselves “stop trying to make QR Codes happen, it will never catch on”?
Split and Join Arbitrary TextLast week I enumerated some strategies to split and join large files on the terminal; let’s see how to do more split and join, but this time for any text on the standard input, just like the creators of Unix wanted us to operate on data.
Split and Join Large FilesThis post explains some useful combinations of commands that you can use on Linux (or sometimes also in other operating systems) to split large files into smaller pieces, and then how to rebuild the original file from those pieces.
Running Programming WorkshopsI’ve attended my fair share of programming workshops, and I have organized quite a few as part of my professional life, which means that, for the best or the worst, I have strong opinions about the subject.
How to Install FreeBSD 14 on a 6th Generation ThinkpadLast weekend I installed FreeBSD on a 6th generation ThinkPad (released in 2018) and I was surprised to learn 2 things: first, how easy it is to install it on this machine, and second, how enjoyable and stable FreeBSD is as a computing environment.
How to Speak, by Patrick WinstonI’ve been recommending this talk a lot lately to people new to the art of speaking, who find themselves all of a sudden boosted to the front stage of an event and in dire need of help.
OpenShift Local CRC From Another MachineDuring the preparation of my “Learning OpenShift” course for LinkedIn Learning, I used OpenShift Local (formerly known as “CodeReady Containers” or CRC) to demonstrate the various features of the platform from a developer’s point of view.
Opening Microsoft Access Databases on LinuxIn the past few months I’ve been writing about my software archeology experiments, including how to convert old HTML code from 1999 to run in today’s browsers, how to run Macromedia Flash movies with Ruffle, or even how to run Java applets now that they aren’t supported anymore.
Recording Getting Started Guides on LinuxAs I’ve said in the past, producing videos in Linux isn’t very straightforward or stable; it can be a bit of bumpy ride. But I’m stubborn, and Linux is the platform I want to use, so when I was tasked with the creation of “Getting Started” video guides for our products at VSHN, I used Linux to create them.
How to Use Demo MagicMy colleague Tobru recently pointed me to demo-magic, and I now seriously wonder how could I ever do a live demo without this. The description of the project says it all:
How to Use a MicrophoneAt some point in your professional speaking life you will have to hold a dynamic microphone in your hands in front of an audience, just like a rock star. Not only should you be aware that it’s not a pepper mill, there’s a few more things to keep in mind while using them.
Live-StreamingLately, I’ve started to stream some live events on YouTube on behalf of VSHN. I was an absolute live-streaming beginner, so I had to learn a few tricks.
How to Write a Programming BookWriting a programming book is not very complicated, to be honest: it just consists of putting one word after another. Shocker! I’m not kidding.
How to Desperately Suck at ClichesI was born in Argentina. This fact, all by itself, provides a rather unlimited amount of smiles in every person I meet.
Getting the Next and the Previous NSIndexPath InstancesVery often, when you work with UITableViewControllers driven by NSFetchedResultsControllers, that you want to get the “previous” or the “next” elements in the results controller. Visually, this operation corresponds, from the point of view of the user, to select the cell that sits immediately above or below from the currently selected one.
Determining Delegate Object Method Call Order in Objective-C with NSProxyThis is a guest post + code, wrote together with Joe D’Andrea from LiquidJoe LLC!
A Proposed Architecture for Network-Bound iOS AppsOne of my most popular answers in StackOverflow is the one I gave to the following question: “What is the best architecture for an iOS application that makes many network requests?”
How knowing C and C++ can help you write better iPhone apps, part 1While learning how to write iOS applications, you will often encounter the phrase “learn C first”. Writers of Cocoa applications apparently benefit from knowing about C (sometimes even C++), but it is not very clear to many new developers how this actually works.
Migrating iPhone 3.x apps to iPad and iOS 4.0Right now, creating Universal Applications for the iPod touch, the iPhone and the iPad is not really a straightforward task. The current panorama of iOS-compatible software and hardware platforms is getting more and more complex, and this blog post is a small guide (by no means exhaustive) of tips and tricks that have helped me get my apps running in as many platforms as possible, with as few headaches as possible.
Objective-C Categories as StylesheetsIt is very important that iPhone and iPad applications use visual styles in a coherent way. This helps users learn how to use your application faster, it helps them scan your UI for important information as quickly as possible, and it also can convey a strong marketing message; companies who want iPhone or iPad applications often have complex visual identities, including predefined fonts and colors, and they will want their applications to match those choices.
How to buy iPad apps outside of the USSo you flew and bought an iPad, you live outside of the US, and you would like to buy iBooks, Pages, Numbers and Keynote (as well as many other amazing apps) from your own country, huh? After all, as Scoble said, “the iPad without apps is pretty lame, actually”.
10 Things Every iPhone App Designer Should KnowDesign is a fundamental part of iPhone app development. It is, without any doubt, the difference between a crappy and a great application. It can be the discriminating factor of life and death on the App Store, and the competition is brilliant and strong. The best teams, like Tapbots, Sophiestication or Jilion have understood that design is part of the process: not a nice to have, and certainly not an afterthought.
Code Organization in Xcode ProjectsXcode does not impose any structure to your source code tree. This is both cool and useful to quickly throw a couple of lines for a prototype, but in my experience, this approach does not scale. More often than not, without any hygiene, your project can become a mess. Just using Xcode defaults, after a while your resources will sit beside your .xcodeproj file, all the project classes will be thrown together in the Classes folder, and if you have a relatively large project, this approach makes finding individual files painful.
10 iPhone Memory Management TipsMemory management in the iPhone is a hot topic. And since I’m talking about it on tonight’s monthly meetup of the French-speaking Swiss iPhone Developers group, I might as well share some tips here from my own experience.
Installing PostgreSQL 8.3 on LeopardThis is the documented path to my discovery of PostgreSQL 8.3, which I’ve never used before. Now that MySQL’s community is getting hammered to death by Sun, and thanks to all the good things I’ve heard about it over the years (including enhanced performance on multicore systems and greater scalability), I really wanted to install it and play with it.
How to build ohcount on LeopardIf you do not know ohcount, you should; the guys at ohloh.net have GPL’d one of their core components, namely the one that allows you to perform source code line counts in your own projects. Neat and useful!
How to Count Words in Latex Files?I am a big LaTeX fan, mostly thanks to my friend Cedric who introduced me to it ;) And I don’t regret it at all; there is simply no better way to create long, beautiful PDF documents, particularly during these times of dissertation writing! I’m in my last step towards the Master’s degree I’ve been working on for the last two years, and creating documents is an important part of that.
How to Test Software Security?Howard and LeBlanc give a very complete answer to this question in their classic “Writing Secure Code” book:
How to create a BibTeX file from a Delicious Library databaseWell, you’re pretty much on your own for that :)
How to Grab or Capture Your Screen With CocoaLately I got curious to know how could I grab the entire desktop of my computer, and save it into a file, or display it into an NSImageView component. I started to look around on the web and discovered that:
How to Install Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper in an Apple G3 iBookAfter upgrading my good ol’ PC to Dapper, I proceeded to download and burn a copy of it for PowerPC systems, and I have managed to install it in my old faithful G3 iBook in dual boot, with Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” on the other partition. Here’s how I did it.
How to Install the Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Network Adapter in Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper“Dapper”, the new version of Ubuntu has been released yesterday! So I downloaded the ISO file, burn the CD down and proceeded to install it over my old Breezy Kubuntu installation.
How to Install the Linksys WPC54GS Wireless G Network Adapter in Ubuntu 5.10 BreezyWell, that was a long title. My mother recently changed her 4-year old Dell Inspiron 4100 for a brand new iMac G5, so I took that old laptop (20 GB hard disk, 256 MB RAM) and, after backing up her data, wiped it completely and reinstalled it with the following configuration.
How to Install Ruby on Rails in Windows 2003Great day; my first full Ruby on Rails application is up and running in production environment. It is installed in an intranet server at my employer’s premises, so I will not be able to show it :(