today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 04, 2026

• OSTechNix ☛ Install Arch Linux with Archinstall Textual UI Step-by-Step

  This step-by-step guide explains how to install Arch Linux using the latest Archinstall 4.0 textual UI. It covers every step - from flashing the USB and booting, through disk encryption, desktop environment setup, firewall selection, and scripted deployments, to your first login and getting the AUR working.

• Hackaday ☛ Burning Wood To Brew Wood To Preserve Wood : Pine Tar

  The distillation process [woodbrew] uses it fairly traditional, and consists of a couple of buckets. One bucket is buried and collects the pine tar; the other, with holes in the bottom to allow the tar to drip out, is filled with fatwood and covered tightly before being surrounded by firewood which is set alight. You could use an alternate source of heat here, but if you just cut down a pine tree for its fatwood, well, you’d have the rest of the tree to work with. Inside the fatwood bucket, the heat of the fire cooks off the volatile compounds that make pine tar, while the lack of oxygen from being closed up keeps it from burning. Burying the collection bucket keeps it from getting so hot the volatiles all boil off.

• Maury ☛ Loading... [13 kB]

  While testing my gopher client, I noticed something interesting: All downloads froze at 13 kilobytes. Sometimes this was barely noticeable, other times it would stall for a good second or so.

• Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Reliability Engineering for Air-Gapped Systems

  Back in February, I helped a few teams from defense sector to measure the right thing (SLI), set reasonable expectations (SLO) and tie reliability to accountability through alerting. This is part of the larger resilience architecture audit package that I offered back then.

  The details is behind an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) but there was an interesting aspect that is worth discussing:

  All those systems were air-gapped, meaning the team that builds the software has no access to metrics, logs or runtime.

• MJ Fransen ☛ Install minimal Recoll on FreeBSD 15

  Recoll is a full text search application. Recoll is based on the very capable Xapian search engine library.

  The FreeBSD package comes with a ton of dependencies, which is great for use on your desktop, but can be a bit of overkill for non-graphical systems.

• PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Inkscape Tutorial: Boolean Path Operations

  It occurred to me earlier that there are so many things you can do with Inkscape, there may be some you don’t know yet. The Paths menu has an awful lot of items, and it might help to know what can be done with each. Let’s go in order down the menu and look at them.

• PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Creating A Memorial Booklet With Typst

  I recently produced a memorial booklet for the 50th reunion of my high school class. The Reunion Committee planned a service to honor the memory of our deceased classmates, and wanted a program booklet for the ceremony. Among the variety of tools available — such as Scribus, Adobe InDesign, Canva, LaTeX — I have never used Scribus or InDesign (and I did not have enough time to learn those programs before our deadline). I have basic skills with Canva; although it was straightforward to create a funeral booklet, I struggled to make a decent two-column layout with automatic text overflow.

  Since the memorial booklet is more text-oriented than graphics-heavy, I thought LaTeX and Typst would be good candidates. I knew that LaTeX could handle this task, based on previous experience, but I wanted to try and replicate it with Typst. Typst ably produced two attractive booklets, so I would like to share my work, in case you need to create similar documents.

• PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Wiki Pick: Cron Jobs

  Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name cron comes from the word “chronos”, Greek for “time”. Cron enables users to schedule jobs to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes, such as backing up important data.

• PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Tip Top Tips: Find Exact Install Date & KDE6 Simple Tips

  This month, we have not one, but two, tips from the PCLinuxOS forum.

  Our first tip is from Ramchu, and will list the exact date and time of the installation of PCLinuxOS on your computer.