I have a bunch of FreeType settings that I prefer on my systems, and these differ from the defaults on basically every Linux distro these days.
2026 update: This is a rather old post, made back when the monitors I used were pretty low-resolution, and saving every pixel of space seemed like a good idea. These days, high-DPI monitors are more common, and the old settings I preferred look absolutely terrible on these.
This page will host an assortment of tips and tricks collected while using Alpine Linux.
GDB seems to have been clearly made with source-level debugging in mind, the kind where the source code of the program is available. Sometimes this is not the case, or you just don’t want to bother looking for the source code. Here I’ll put a bunch of useful commands.
shell scripts:
grab lines from dictionary, convert them into up-to-16-byte strings, do a binary dump
for x in `cat input_words.txt`; do echo $x | tr -d \\n | dd ibs=16 conv=sync 2>/dev/null | xxd; done
convert a .vgz directory to a .vgm one, along with updating all the playlists:
rename ".vgz" ".vgm.gz" *.vgz; gzip -d *.vgm.gz; sed -i "s/\.vgz/\.vgm/" *.m3u
(requires rename from util-linux and not from perl)
Some small hints for profiling utilities used on Linux systems.
This is a small cheat sheet to remind me of how parameter expansion works in unix shells.