Two Git papercuts, back to back: VS Code’s Publish Branch doing nothing on an empty repo, and the GitHub credentials trap that bites on every new machine. Both have quick fixes — including the one gh auth login often skips.
novelWriter is in the official Fedora repos — but the packaged version is old enough to write a different project file format, which matters a lot if you write on more than one machine. Here’s the pipx route, the enchant2/hunspell step macOS doesn’t need, and how to switch over if you already used dnf.
The DMG builds for novelWriter are gone, and the official pip commands don’t work on modern macOS either. Here’s why, and how pipx fixes it in about five minutes.
Five seconds to pick Fedora or Windows is four seconds too few. Here’s how to give GRUB more time, and – the trick I set up on my Z840 years ago and never wrote down – how to make it boot whatever you chose last time. Two lines, one twist: Fedora already has half of it.
Bluetooth vanished from my Z8 workstation while WiFi on the same card kept working. Instead of shrugging and reaching for wired headphones, I read the crime scene with PowerShell — and learnt that Windows has a dmesg after all. Nobody just tells you where to look.
The famous Mac startup chime lives in firmware, not macOS — which is why it survives a Fedora install. Here’s how to silence it from Linux by writing a single byte to NVRAM, and why 64 means half volume but 128 means silence.
When my 2011 MacBook Air started crashing its entire desktop every time a new app launched, the obvious suspect was the app. Three wrong theories later, journalctl, coredumpctl and one stack trace led to a confirmed upstream Mesa bug — and a one-line workaround. A practical tour of Linux crash forensics: the tools, the reading skills, and the discipline of letting evidence outrank a good story.
A dead battery held an old Chromebook hostage, a $14 replacement brought it back — and now runs the machine for hours while insisting it doesn’t exist. A tale of brownout loops, battery part numbers, deep-sleep protection, and learning to love a mute fuel gauge.
