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There’s a bug in the latest version of Ubuntu, whereby the XFCE4 lock screen repeatedly crashes. It’s already been fixed upstream in version 4.18.0, but as yet a fix has yet to be backported to Ubuntu. The fix is fairly simple, so I applied it to the current Ubuntu package and rebuilt it. Below are notes on how to do that.

First, edit your apt sources list to enable source download. Make sure that /etc/apt/sources.list includes the following line, uncommented (leave the other lines unchanged):

For laptops that are usually plugged into mains power, it’s a good idea to either remove the battery (if it’s removable), or limit the maximum charge. This extends the battery life, as keeping a battery fully charged all the time is not good for it. Many Windows laptops come with power saving tools to configure this, but the means of doing so are not very standardised and I haven’t seen any graphical Linux tools to manage it.

I recently switched to using an LG Gram laptop. Current Linux kernels have a bug with this series of laptops, which cause the CPU load to spike when a USB-C device is attached, which includes the power supply. The CPU load spike in turn overheats the CPU, maxes out the fan, and reduces battery life. Apparently a fix is expected from the mainline kernel soon, but in the meantime, I needed a way of mitigating it.

At the moment I'm working on a project where I need to use Windows, but don't have access to the Windows subsystem for Linux. In order to get access to Linux command line tools, I've installed Cygwin. For some reason Cygwin frequently breaks after a system reboot. Clicking on the Cygwin terminal launcher from the start menu, or from within Windows Explorer, briefly flickers as the Cygwin terminal starts and then immediately closes. There are lots of posts about similar issues on online forums, which generally involve some complex reinstallation of Cygwin, or updating the launch shortcuts.

On one of the mail servers I maintain, we use the Dovecot Xapian FTS plugin (via apt package dovecot-fts-xapian) to provide full text search for our IMAP users. To keep the indexes up to date, we have a simple cron job:

In modern web development, JavaScript and CSS resources are frequently updated as development progresses. Also, if the versions of JavaScript and CSS resources that a client uses are out of sync, the display will break.

When domain registrations for the .uk TLD* were introduced in 2014, many in the technical community dismissed it as a cynical cash grab by Nominet. Since then, they seem to have been proven right, as evidenced in media coverage by The Register among others. However, several years ago I registered a .uk domain to use for personal emails, as much for the novelty as anything.

Today I noticed that my usual code editors had stopped displaying code in monospace. Here is a quick fix to get that working again.

Monospace fonts are a huge help when editing code, as they make it much simpler to follow the vertical alignment of code at a glance. This is useful for whitespace-agnostic languages such as JavaScript, PHP, C++ etc, and essential for whitespace-dependent languages such as Python.

Recently I’ve frequently been finding myself needing to look up details of custom stored procedures in PostgreSQL databases. Here are a few helpful queries for that.

First, a simple list of the queries:

SELECT n.nspname AS schema, p.proname AS procedure FROM pg_proc p JOIN pg_namespace n ON p.pronamespace = n.oid WHERE n.nspname NOT IN ('pg_catalog', 'information_schema') AND p.prokind = 'p';

Second, the owner of the procedures:

SELECT proname, proowner::regrole FROM pg_proc WHERE pronamespace::regnamespace::text = 'public';

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps for Business) is changing its default policy to require 2FA (two factor authentication) for all accounts. While this is good news for security, Google have made it very difficult to maintain privacy at the same time.