How to automatically sync screenshots from the Steamdeck to Immich

As part of my ongoing effort to reduce my dependency on US services, I just moved my photos from Google Photos to a self-hosted immich instance (which I btw can only recommend so far). You might remember from a previous TIL that I had my Steamdeck configured to push my screenshots into a custom album on Google Photos. Obviously I had to change that now as well, but sadly couldn’t use the existing rclone-based setup for it. ...

March 25, 2025 · 3 min

How to fix VirtualBox on Fedora 40 with Kernel 6.12+

I (accidentally1) did a software update on my laptop last night, and this morning when I needed my Win10 VM for something, VirtualBox threw an error like this at me: VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE). A quick web search for “fedora update virtualbox vboxisomaker” gave me this forum post and consequently this bug report, in which I found the solution: I just had to add the kernel parameter kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0 to disable KVM - which comes enabled by default since Kernel 6.12. I accomplished that with grubby: ...

February 27, 2025 · 1 min

How to print Deutsche Post stamps via the command line on a Brother QL label printer

Update from 2024-01-12: I’ve updated the scripts to support both 50mm and 62mm wide labels, and added some more whitespace trimming to the basic stamp. The post has been adjusted accordingly. I recently acquired a Brother QL-820NWB label printer to be able to quickly create labels for boxes and such, and ideally also print out Deutsche Post’s “print yourself” stamps with it. The Deutsche Post stamp shop allows me to download PDFs targeting the 62mm wide endless labels for that printer, for the two types of stamps I’m interested in (stamp, and address label with stamp). But my attempts in printing those directly to the printer through Gnome’s printer integration weren’t successful, things were too small, the cutter didn’t work etc. ...

January 11, 2024 · Updated January 12, 2024 · 3 min

How to fix GRUB after a SteamOS update

My partner just ran into an issue after updating his SteamDeck to the latest SteamOS version (3.4.x to 3.5.7). He has a dual boot setup running using rEFInd, and while that survived the OS update just fine, when he wanted to return to SteamOS after a quick stint in Windows today, he was greeted by a GRUB boot menu. Detective foosel to the rescue. Attempting to boot the SteamOS entry in grub resulted in an error like this (with another device UUID): ...

November 25, 2023 · 2 min

How to fix VirtualBox on Fedora 38 with Kernel 6.4.10+ by adding a missing include

I recently did a software update on my laptop running Fedora 38, and that also brought in a kernel update. Starting my Win10 VirtualBox VM afterwards no longer worked as it needed the kernel module to be recompiled. However, that failed: $ sudo /sbin/vboxconfig [sudo] password for gina: vboxdrv.sh: Stopping VirtualBox services. depmod: WARNING: could not open modules.order at /lib/modules/6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64: No such file or directory depmod: WARNING: could not open modules.builtin at /lib/modules/6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64: No such file or directory depmod: WARNING: could not open modules.builtin.modinfo at /lib/modules/6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64: No such file or directory vboxdrv.sh: Starting VirtualBox services. vboxdrv.sh: Building VirtualBox kernel modules. egrep: warning: egrep is obsolescent; using grep -E vboxdrv.sh: failed: Look at /var/log/vbox-setup.log to find out what went wrong. There were problems setting up VirtualBox. To re-start the set-up process, run /sbin/vboxconfig as root. If your system is using EFI Secure Boot you may need to sign the kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt, vboxnetadp, vboxpci) before you can load them. Please see your Linux system's documentation for more information. A look into /var/log/vbox-setup.log revealed an error along the lines of this one1: ...

September 7, 2023 · 2 min

How to monitor network traffic on my USG via Wireshark

I’m currently trying to figure out some internal network issues1 and for that need to monitor the traffic of a specific device on my network. I’m using a Unifi USG as my router (behind the ISP’s Fritzbox that I consider hostile since it’s not mine). I found this post on reddit that explains how to capture traffic on the USG via tcpdump and send it through the SSH session to Wireshark on my laptop: ...

August 28, 2023 · 2 min

How to fix VirtualBox on Fedora 38 with Kernel 6.3.5 by disabling IBT

For accounting and some windows only software (👋 Affinity Designer) I have a Windows 10 VM running in VirtualBox on my Framework running Fedora 38. Apparently I got a kernel update recently and as of this morning the VM refused to start. It just hung, and a look into journalctl showed something like this: Jun 13 10:23:50 draper kernel: traps: Missing ENDBR: 0xffff9b688c308f30 After some searching I came across this thread on the VirtualBox forums which explained the issue and also includes the solution. Apparently the VirtualBox kernel driver triggers Intel’s IBT (indirect branch tracking). The solution is to disable that1 by passing ibt=off as a kernel parameter: ...

June 13, 2023 · 1 min

How to add Battle.net games to the Steamdeck

Update 2023-06-07: It turns out that these days, the by far easiest way to get Battle.net on the SteamDeck is using NonSteamLaunchers-On-Steam-Deck, as I recently saw on Gaming On Linux. I haven’t gotten a chance to try this myself yet, but it certainly looks very much straight forward, albeit not featuring individual game entries in Steam. For your quick Diablo fix, it should hopefully be just fine though. Battle.net is currently having a spring sale and I’ve been eyeing Diablo II: Resurrected for a while now, so I jumped on the chance (and while at it also got StarCraft Remastered). But given that these days I primarily game on the Steamdeck, I needed to find a way to install Battle.net on my deck and also install individual launchers for the games. ...

April 15, 2023 · Updated June 7, 2023 · 3 min

How to override the EDID data of a monitor under Linux

I’m slowly but surely fixing all the issues I had after switching back to Linux as my main OS, so here’s another TIL 😉 My secondary monitor is a 24" DELL with a resolution of 1920x1200, so 16:10, instead of the more common 1080p and 16:9. In order to be able to connect all my three monitors to my laptop, I make use of both the laptop’s HDMI port as well as a USB-C dock that has 2 HDMI ports. The 4k main display is connected directly to the laptop’s HDMI port, secondary and tertiary display are connected to the dock. ...

April 11, 2023 · 3 min

How to reduce the titlebar size of Gnome 43

A few weeks ago I switched back to Linux as my primary OS, on a newly acquired refurbished Framework Laptop 11, and one thing that’s since been bothering me on my chosen desktop environment Gnome1 has been the HUGE titlebars: So I finally dug into solving this quickly, and came across this post on Reddit with a quite nice solution. I modified ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and added the following contents: ...

April 11, 2023 · 1 min
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