today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 06, 2026

• Linuxize ☛ ffmpeg Command in Linux: Convert, Compress, and Extract Media

  Practical ffmpeg examples for converting between formats, compressing video with CRF, extracting audio, trimming clips, resizing video, and batch processing files on Linux.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install GIMP on Rocky GNU/Linux 10, 9 and 8

  Install GIMP on Rocky GNU/Linux 10, 9, and 8 with the package source that fits your desktop: Flathub for the current branch, the official AppImage for a portable build, or AppStream where Rocky still ships the package, with verification, launch, update, and removal steps.

• How to Install Kitty on FunOS

  Kitty is a modern, fast, and highly customizable terminal emulator that offers excellent performance for developers, system administrators, and GNU/Linux enthusiasts. Whether you want a lightweight terminal for everyday command-line tasks or an advanced terminal packed with powerful features, Kitty is an excellent choice. On FunOS, you can install Kitty in two different ways.

• Sophie Koonin ☛ Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix

  I've given my website a bit of a refresh! There's a slightly updated layout if you're on desktop, plus I ditched the etc page and I've revamped my links page to be powered by raindrop.io. The minimalist theme is still minimalist, but a bit more fancy. The vaporwave theme has a newly jazzed-up nav bar with some adorable little icons. But the biggest change is to the city theme, which was previously a starry-sky dark mode theme.

• University of Toronto ☛ Sometimes it actually is the network: a war story

  We've recently been having mysterious problems getting some of our backups to perform well. Also I recently wrote about how we'd wound up with a web server that frequently saturated its outgoing 1G interface with traffic (and it was a feature that it didn't have a faster network link). These two things turn out to not be as unrelated as we'd like, and there's a story or two there.

• University of Toronto ☛ What buffer size (OpenSSH) ssh seems to use for streaming output

  If you're experiencing IO problems in this backup process, an interesting question is what buffer size ssh uses for its writes, perhaps because you'd like to make a few large writes to disk (for example, at the natural 128 KByte block size for your ZFS fileservers, even when you're writing over NFS) instead of a bunch of smaller ones.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PhotoPrism on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    If you want a clean, reliable way to self-host your photo library, Install PhotoPrism on Ubuntu 26.04 is a strong place to start.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install BleachBit on Fedora 44

    Installing BleachBit on Fedora 44 is simple, but doing it the right way matters.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Prometheus on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    If your server crashes at 3 a.m. and you find out from an angry client instead of an alert, you have a monitoring problem.