today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 24, 2023

• • How to Hide the Top Bar and Dock in Ubuntu

    Imagine diving into your work or favorite shows with no distractions. Hiding the top bar and dock in Ubuntu does just that. It's like customizing your Ubuntu desktop to fit your vibe and make everything flow better.

    [...]

    Auto-hiding the top bar and dock can give you a distraction-free workspace, and it maximizes your working area, especially if you have a smaller screen. It can also hide active apps and notifications from people looking at your screen.

    Still, you may not want the top bar and dock completely gone in Ubuntu. They're two graphical components that make accessing applications, settings, and notifications a breeze. These elements improve your experience and ensure easy navigation within the system. Whether you need to launch an app, tweak your settings, or stay updated with notifications, the Ubuntu top bar and dock have got you covered.

    Ultimately, the decision to hide the top bar and dock in Ubuntu is a matter of your personal preference and specific needs. You have the option to either hide them permanently or set them to auto-hide, depending on what you like.

  • How to install Chrome on Ubuntu

    Ubuntu comes pre-installed with the Firefox web browser, but it just so happens that the popular Google Chrome also works. So, if you want to use Google's web browser on one of the most popular Linux distributions, just as you would on macOS and Windows, we have some good news. Chrome is available for download on an Ubuntu laptop or any other Ubuntu machine. There are two ways you can install it. You can enjoy a manual download with the default Firefox web browser, similar to how you might use Edge to do this on Windows, or you can install it using Terminal.

  • How to install Pip on Ubuntu

    If you're a developer using a laptop running Linux or one of the other popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, there's no doubt you're going to eventually need to use Pip Installs Packages, known as Pip for short. Pip is the package manager for Python, and you'll need it to install, search for, and deal with the Python Package index to help them work right. You might need to use Pip as a regular user to install an app that was developed using Python. Here's how to do it.

  • How to play games on your Chromebook

    Chromebooks aren't generally known for their gaming chops. Even the best Chromebooks specifically made for gaming, like the Acer 516 GE, have integrated graphics cards that struggle to run most modern titles.

    But although they offer a smaller game library compared to what you'd be able to play on the best gaming laptops, there are still loads of great games available on a Chromebook. You just have to know where to look, and how to get the most out of your hardwar

  • Day 24: How to Generate an SVG Diagram from JavaScript

    SVG also work well with frontend libraries. Here’s an example of a React component that generates a data-driven diagram. In this example we have two things. We are generating a list of rectangles to create a column diagram based on some arbitrary data. And we also generate a series of coordinates for a polyline.

  • Responsive SVGs

    SVG can be a tricky subject. If you're a developer, you might need to have an interest in design to really dive into SVGs. And if you're a designer, you'll need to know a bit about coding to do more than just export files from design tools like Figma. This might be why we rarely see custom-made responsive SVGs, even though they are incredibly useful and versatile. In this post, I’ll guide you through the basics of creating a responsive SVG.

  • What I think the 'SMTP Smuggling' attack enables

    The very brief summary of SEC Consult's "SMTP Smuggling" attack is that under the right circumstances, it allows you (the attacker) to cause one mail server to 'submit' an email with contents and SMTP envelope information that you provide to a second mail server. To the second email server, this smuggled email will appear to have come from the first mail server (because it did), and can inherit some of the authentication the first mail server has.

    (It's important to understand that the actual vulnerability is in the second mail server, not the first one; the first one can and often must be completely RFC compliant in its behavior.)

  • The devil is in the details: a look into a disclosure widget markup

    All of this sounds like quite some work for a relatively simple component pattern, it'd be cool if we had a native option to make a disclosure widget... Oh, wait, we have one! This is where our second approach enters, and that's using the <details> and <summary> elements. Let's come back to our initial markup and let's modify it with this approach.