From within a local network, you have to use hostname.local rather than hostname for name resolution to work.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

When running Meld on macOS Mojave, the Meld window will sometimes fail to appear.  The menu is there, but not the window.  Once this happens, it will stay broken until some saved state files are deleted:
rm -rf ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/org.gnome.meld.savedState/

The kludgey fix is to have the Meld start-up script do this for you. Add that line to /usr/local/Caskroom/meld/3.19.2-r6,osx-15/meld.wrapper.sh right before
exec '/Applications/Meld.app/Contents/MacOS/Meld' "$@"

Source: https://github.com/yousseb/meld/issues/70

The proprietary NVidia drivers for the GeForce GTX 750 are acting up again. Here’s the fix:

First verify that the wrong driver is in use:

lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 vga

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GM107 [GeForce GTX 750] [10de:1381] (rev a2) 
    Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] GM107 [GeForce GTX 750] [1462:3101]
    Kernel driver in use: nvidia

You should see nvidia as the kernel driver.  If you’re here, you probably see nouveau and maybe a few others.  Nouveau doesn’t work right with the GTX 750 and never has (and probably never will).

Download the NVidia 64-bit Linux driver.  At the time of this writing, it’s at https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/145182

Install the driver. This is a two step process because the Nouveau driver is likely loaded by initramfs and needs to be removed. This requires a reboot.

sudo service lightdm stop
sudo sh ./NVIDIA*         # This is the driver you just downloaded
sudo update-initramfs -u  # purge nouveau driver from initramfs
sudo reboot

If your graphics are running at the right resolution, you can stop here.  If not, continue:

sudo service lightdm stop
sudo sh ./NVIDIA*
sudo service lightdm start

Source:  https://askubuntu.com/questions/823304/ubuntu-16-04-nvidia-driver-works-until-reboot

1. Turn off smartphone’s Bluetooth if headphones are connected to it.
2. On headphones, hold Bluetooth slider forward until headphones reply “Ready to connect”.
3. On the computer, go to System Settings > Bluetooth.
4. Select + to add a device.
5. Select “Bose QC35 II”. Leave PIN options as they are.
6. Go to System Settings > Sound
7. Select Output tab.
8. On “Play sound through”, choose Headphone – Bose QC35 II.
9. Change Mode to High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink).

I tried to pair headphones to my Ubuntu desktop and couldn’t do it because Bluetooth refused to turn on. My first instinct was to check if Bluetooth was disabled in BIOS, but this Lenovo K450 doesn’t have that option. Here’s how it was fixed:

System Settings > Bluetooth, showed Bluetooth off. Turning it on still showed “Bluetooth is disabled”.

Checking if it was software disabled checked out also:
rfkill list bluetooth
showed that it was not blocked.

Finally, I found it was disabled in the Bluetooth configuration file. To enable, edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and add the line:
AutoEnable=true
Ask Ubuntu Reference
Then restart Bluetooth:
sudo service bluetooth restart

These instructions are from https://www.rootusers.com/lvm-resize-how-to-increase-an-lvm-partition/. Note: Some output to the commands below that’s not relevant to these instructions has been removed, so your output will be different.

See capacity of current root file system:

$ df -h /
Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root2   99G   82G   12G  88% /

Check size of volume group to make sure it has enough space:

$ sudo vgdisplay
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               ubuntu-vg
  VG Size               931.27 GiB
Alloc PE / Size 53231 / 207.93 GiB
Free PE / Size 185174 / 723.34 GiB

Check size of logical volume:

$ sudo lvdisplay
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/ubuntu-vg/root2
  LV Name                root2
  VG Name                ubuntu-vg
  LV Size                100.00 GiB

It has 100GB, but needs 175GB.

To expand the volume group by 75GB:

$ sudo lvextend -L+75G /dev/ubuntu-vg/root2

Check that it’s now 175GB:

$ sudo lvdisplay
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/ubuntu-vg/root2
  LV Name                root2
  VG Name                ubuntu-vg
  LV Size                175.00 GiB

Now expand the file system:

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/ubuntu-vg/root2

Check that it’s done:

$ df -h /
Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root2  173G   93G   72G  57% /

I have a dual monitor set up running Ubuntu 16. The goofy thing was there were two application switchers. One would be displayed on the monitor with the active window and the other would be displayed on the monitor with the cursor. If the cursor was on the same monitor as the active window, one would be on top of the other and it was difficult to tell what application would become active.
To fix this, run CompizConfig Settings Manager and uncheck “Application Switcher” in the Window Management section.

In Ubuntu 14 and 16, there is not much to distinguish the active window visually. It can help to set a highly visible shadow around the active window, for instance, red.

1. Install CompizConfig settings manager.
2. Under Desktop, select Ubuntu Unity Plugin.
3. Select the Decorations tab.
4. Set Active window shadow color to red 255, Green 0, Blue 0, and Opacity 255.

This had nothing to do with Google Sheets itself, but rather an extension I use called Don’t Fuck with Paste. This extension disables copy and paste blocking.  The extension had a major upgrade a couple months ago that enabled the extension only for sites added to a blacklist.  The blacklist supports regular expressions to match URLs.  Unfortunately, a blank expression matches everything and somehow a blank RegEx was in the blacklist–I don’t know if this is the default for the extension or if I did it by mistake and I haven’t tried to find out.  You can tell if the extension is active for a site if the extension’s icon is blue rather than grey.  You can tell if a blank RegEx is in the list by clicking on the icon and looking if there’s a cancel button next to a blank line:

instead of this (the URL displayed will be the one displayed in the current browser tab, but the important thing is that there’s no X next to it):

Clicking the X removed the blank RegEx and turned the extension off for all sites by default, thus fixing Google Sheets.

On finding extension problems

When something goofy is broken, the first thing to do is to browse to the site with an Incognito window, which turns off all extensions.  If the site works in Incognito mode, the problem is due to an extension.  The next step is to figure out which extension is breaking things.  If you don’t have an idea of which extension might be the problem, a binary search is the fastest way:  Disable the first half of all extensions, reload the page and see if it works.  If not, re-enable the first half, then disable the second half.  Keep splitting the groups in half until you find the extension at fault.

Dot files are unix configuration files that contain your personalized settings for programs like Vim, Emacs, or tmux.  If you use more than one unix machine, keeping these file in sync is much easier if they’re stored in Git.  These instructions are how I do that.

Fork the GitHub repository

https://github.com/dotphiles/dotphiles

Set up for GitHub

If the machine hasn’t been set up with GitHib, follow these instructions
https://help.github.com/articles/set-up-git/
to install Git, set your commit name and email, and install GitHub credentials.

Clone the repository

git clone --recursive git@github.com:zymurgeek/dotphiles.git ~/.dotfiles
Do not leave off the recursive flag!

Manage dot files

See the instructions in ~/.dotfiles/README.md.