today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 13, 2026

• Arun Raghavan ☛ Arun Raghavan: Accessibility Update: Enabling Mono Audio

  If you maintain a GNU/Linux audio settings component, we now have a way to globally enable/disable mono audio for users who do not want stereo separation of their audio (for example, due to hearing loss in one ear). Read on for the details on how to do this.

• Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Reducing the size of initramfs kernel images

  In the past few years, the size of the kernel images in Debian have been steadily growing. I don't see this as a problem per se, but it has been causing me trouble, as my /boot partition has become too small to accommodate two kernel images at the same time.

• Linux Handbook ☛ Using journalctl vacuum to Clean and Control Logs on Linux

  journalctl --vacuum is beneficial for reclaiming disk space, managing log retention policies, and maintaining optimal system performance. Knowing how to control journal logs ensures that disk space is never unexpectedly consumed.

• Arseny ☛ FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 7 – NFSv4 and use with Linux clients

  My idea is for the Samba share to be used for various media resources requiring access from phones and TVs, while NFS will be exclusively for Linux hosts – two laptops in different networks (home and office) that will perform their backups to this partition using rsync, rclone, or restic.

• University of Toronto ☛ Something you don't want to do when using Spamhaus's DQS with Exim

  For reasons outside the scope of this entry, we recently switched from Spamhaus's traditional public DNS (what is now called the 'public mirrors') to an account with their Data Query Service. The DQS data can still be queried via DNS, which presents a problem: DNS queries have no way to carry any sort of access key with them. Spamhaus has solved this problem by embedding your unique access key in the zone name you must use. Rather than querying, say, zen.spamhaus.org, you query '<key>.zen.dq.spamhaus.net'. Because your DQS key is tied to your account and your account has query limits, you don't want to spread your DQS key around for other people to pick up and use.

• Tangled Labs Oy ☛ we rolled our own documentation site

  We recently organized our documentation and put it up on https://docs.tangled.org, using just pandoc. For several reasons, using pandoc to roll your own static sites is more than sufficient for small projects.

• Louie Mantia ☛ How to Make a Damn Website

  It’s easy to forget how simple a website can be. A website can be just one page. It doesn’t even need CSS. You don’t need a content management system like Wordpress. All you have to do is write some HTML and drag that file to a server over FTP.

  For years now, people have tried to convince us that this is the “hard” way of making a website, but in reality, it may be the easiest.

  It doesn’t have to be super complicated. However, with this post, I will assume you’ve written at least some HTML and CSS before, and that you know how to upload files to a server. If you’ve never done these things, it may seem like I’m skipping over some things. I am.