Blog / Linux

How to compress PDF files on Ubuntu Linux with Ghostscript

March 28, 2021

This is something I have to do from time to time especially around tax season as I tend to get scanned documents in PDF format which are just unnecessarily too big in size.

I like to keep important documents in smaller sizes as I keep them archived for a long a time and they add up.  I want to be able to quickly download or upload them somewhere even with a slow internet connection.

I …

Setting up additional entropy for your Ubuntu VPS with haveged

June 28, 2020

We've recently ran into an issue with one of our staging servers where a scheduled cron job would occassionally hang for a few minutes before executing.  The issue turned out to be due to a low entopy (i.e. randomness) value in /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail.

Randomness in Linux is generated from hardware interrupts such as the keyboard, mouse, and disk/network IO.  This goes into a pool which then gets consumed by applications that require randomness for security, such as …

How to connect an Xbox One S controller via Bluetooth in Pop!_OS 18.04 (Ubuntu 18.04)

September 22, 2019

In Pop!_OS 18.04 (which is based on Ubuntu), connecting an Xbox One S controller via USB works out of the box and detected by Steam automatically. No additional steps necessary. I've been gaming mostly on my laptop so I've just being using a USB cable so I won't have to think about batteries.

However, I've recently moved to a new AirBnB with a nice big screen TV so I wanted to try it out and …

Gaming on Linux

July 28, 2019

I just finished playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on Linux. In the 70 hours of playtime, the game ran flawlessly. I couldn't recall a single crash or slowdown.

And guess what? There is no native Linux port of this game! I played the Windows version on Linux thanks to Proton and Steam Play. No special tweaking required, just click "Install" and "Play." My Xbox One S controller was detected automatically, it feels …

Flameshot: An awesome screenshot capture tool for Linux

December 24, 2018

When it comes to screen capture and other media editing tools, Linux really falls behind in terms of good options out there compared to Windows and Mac.

For a long time I've been using the default "Screenshot" tool that comes with Ubuntu. While it works fine, it does require quite a bit of additional steps if you need to annotate the image as you have to save it first then use another tool to add …

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