On Ubuntu I always had a hard time resizing windows as window borders are so thin that they are hard to grab.

Using the mouse

My solution for Ubuntu Mate was to resize windows with ALT + right mouse and move them with ALT + left mouse.

Ubuntu with Gnome Shell (Ubuntu 20.04) uses different shortcuts. You have to use the super key (windows key) with mouse-wheel-click to resize.

If this feels awkward to you, you can change this using the Tweaks application:

• select Windows > Window Action Key > Alt
• enable Windows > R...

When you are using a dedicated webcam device on a desktop machine, you never want to use its microphone. Here is how to disable it.
This can be useful if "smart" voice chat or phone software picks its microphone at random. If you disable all but one, you can avoid that.

1. sudo apt install pavucontrol
2. Launch pavucontrol
3. Go to the "Configuration" tab at the very right
4. Disable your webcam's microphone by choosing "Off" from the dropdown menu.

You may use any other mixer tool wher...

When another person on a Meet call is sharing their screen, text may be hard to read due to the large number of UI elements taking up space.

Here are some things you can do to increase the size of the shared screen:

• Pin the shared screen by hovering over it and pressing the Pin icon.
• Hover over your own image and press the Minimize icon.
• In the Meet Menu (triple dots) switch your Layout to "Focus".
• Zoom out (!) by pressing CTRL+minus a couple of times. This reduces the size of the Meet controls at the bottom. You can later ...

Thunderbird 78 and newer handles GPG differently than previous versions as previously the extension Enigmail was used to handle GPG functionality. Now Thunderbird has GPG built-in, Enigmail is no longer needed and no longer works.

The main implication due to this is that Thunderbird uses its own keystore. Therefore you don't have to enter a passphrase for your key. The good news is that you can, if you want and know what you do, use your system GPG (as previosly) for private key operations. See the appropriate section below, if you want to ...

To test your microphone you can either check the amplitude in the settings or create a temporary loop.

Start the loopback

pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=1000

The effect ist something like this:

• Speak "Hello"
• You will hear your "Hello" as echo 1 second later

Stop the loopback

pactl unload-module module-loopback

If colors rendered by Chrome look off (e.g. bright red becomes a tone of brown), try this:

• Go to chrome://flags
• Search for "color"
• Set "Force color profile" to "sRGB"
• Restart Chrome

If your colors look good, you don't have to do this.

Persistently disabling Bluetooth across reboots is not trivial on some Ubuntus (I'm using 16.04 LTS).

Instead of configuring systemd or editing config files, you may also disable Bluetooth in your BIOS:

• Interrupt start-up with a hotkey (ENTER on my X260)
• Enter BIOS configuration utility
• Go to Security
• Go to I/O Port Access
• Set Bluetooth to Disabled
• Save changes and reboot

Visit meet.new Archive to quickly create a meeting with a random ID.

We suggest adding a bookmark for https://meet.new/ to your browser.

Here are some tools that are useful to manipulate PDF documents under Linux/Ubuntu:

Xournal Archive (Ubuntu 14.04+)

Add text, add images, add hand-written notes. No geometrical shapes. Recommended. Simple tool to insert a signature image and some text to a PDF.

uPdf Archive (old Ubuntus)

Add text, add images, add geometrical shapes. Horrible GUI, but works some of the time.

PDF-Arranger Archive (PDF-Shuffler on old Ubuntus)

Graphical G...

The centerpiece of our home office setup usually consists of a docking station which charges the notebook and acts as a proxy to various peripheral devices.

For reference, I am running Ubuntu 18.04 on a Thinkpad T480. You might not run into the same issues on other devices.

Lately I switched to using the ThinkVision P27h Archive monitor. The neat thing is that it made my docking station unessential:

• The monitor offe...

When your PC no longer reacts to input, you might be able to restart your MATE session:

• Open another terminal with CTRL+ALT+F1.
• Sign in with your user and password
• killall mate-session

If successful you should see the visual login prompt (it will automatically switch back to CTRL+ALT+F7).

After that, go back to CTRL+ALT+F1 and log out with exit so no one with physical access to your PC can use that session. The session will not be locked by the screen saver in your graphical MATE environment!

makandra cards now has a "Reader mode" that will display the current card in a minimal layout. This is useful for presentations.

We added some keyboard shortcuts to help with navigation:

• You can activate Reader Mode by pressing R or by clicking the book icon.
• You can navigate between cards using the left and right cursor keys.
• To close Reader Mode, press R or Escape.
• To edit the current card, press E.

These keyboard shortcuts also work in the regular card view.

Encrypting

gpg -e -a -r <receiver@email.address> [-r <receiver2@email.address>]
<type message>
<ctrl d>

Now copy the PGP message to your mail client and send that mail.

• You need one -r flag per receiver address
• With a single receiver, you can also write gpg -ear reci@pie.nt

Decrypting

gpg -d
<paste encrypted message>
<ctrl d>

Adding public keys

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --search-keys <user@domain.com>
<number of the search result that should be imported>

Also see [Using GPG/PG...

If you're running Ubuntu Mate and your Zoom suddenly has huge buttons, it might assume you're using a very High DPI display. While this is usually a good idea, the heuristic determining whether to enable this HiDPI mode or not does not work perfectly with Ubuntu Mate and multiple displays.

Force a specific scale factor

Unfortunately, this setting is not exposed in the GUI, you'll have to change the config file.

First, make sure zoom is closed completely, i.e. there should not be a zoom icon in the panel next to the clock.

Open `~/.conf...