Does CapsLock annoy you? Ever wished it actually did something useful instead of SHOUTING AT PEOPLE BY ACCIDENT?

Capsper is push-to-talk voice dictation for Linux. Hold CapsLock, speak, release. Text appears wherever your cursor is. No cloud, no subscription, no Electron app phoning home. Just your GPU doing what GPUs were meant to do.

The pitch

~2 second latency between speaking and words appearing on screen. Runs entirely on your machine. Works on both X11 and Wayland. Single binary, no dependencies to manage, no Python runtime, no Docker container. You download it, run the installer, and CapsLock becomes useful for the first time in its miserable existence.

After upgrading to an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti (Blackwell architecture, released January 2025), WebGL stopped working in Chrome. Sites like webglreport.com showed “This browser supports WebGL 2, but it is disabled or unavailable.”

The system-level OpenGL worked fine (glxinfo showed full OpenGL 4.6 support), so the issue was Chrome-specific.

The Problem

Chrome was running with --use-gl=disabled. You can check this with:

ps aux | grep chrome | grep -oE '\-\-use-gl=[^ ]*'

The RTX 5070 Ti and driver 580.x are so new that Chrome’s GPU blocklist doesn’t recognise them, so it defaults to disabling GL entirely.

A practical introduction to NTFs

- 3 mins read

I’ve been doing some NFT research for myself, but though I would share in case one else finds some value.

30 second intro to NFTs: https://niftygateway.com/whatisanifty

In depth description of an NFT (and lots more information): https://blog.opensea.io/guides/non-fungible-tokens/#What_is_a_non-fungible_token

So the next thing to understand is that in the world of cryptocurrencies there are many different ones. Bitcoin is probably the one you have heard about but there are literally thousands:
https://coinmarketcap.com/

The second biggest cryptocurrency is called Ethereum and it is also the largest market for NFTs (via https://opensea.io/ or https://niftygateway.com/)

So I had installed the latest version of OBS Studio (26.x) from the official channels but when I went to the output mode it only listed software encoding. In the logs it mentioned FFMPEG-VAAPI but wasn’t using it as any recording was using 30%-50% CPU on a low powered laptop.

In Settings -> Output change Outmode to Advanced (from Simple) then on Streaming -> Encoder change that to FFMPEG VAAPI (Recoding should just be set to use Streaming Encoder which is the default)

Remote Working Links

- 2 mins read

Special thanks to Scott Muc and S+C. Please post more links in the comments and I’ll add them in

Guides / Playbooks

Leading in crisis: Setting up for remote success
https://www.thoughtworks.com/remote-work-playbook

Remote First in Tes Technology
https://engineering.tes.com/how-we-work/remote/

How to Work Remotely and Still Be the Best
http://www.toptal.com/freelance/how-to-work-remotely-and-still-be-the-best

Smart Home: 10 Tips for Working Remotely - Postlight - Digital Product Studio
https://postlight.com/trackchanges/podcast/smart-home-10-tips-for-working-remotely

A guide to distributed work
https://jakemccrary.com/blog/2017/10/31/a-guide-to-distributed-work/

remote - Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
https://stuartsierra.com/tag/remote

47 Insanely Practical Work From Home Tips from Our 100% Remote Team
https://www.groovehq.com/blog/work-from-home

So I had my usual problem with screen tearing on Ubuntu 19.10 but instead of my usual switching to Metacity + Compton I wanted to try using Gnome Shell. However Gnome shell doesn’t support replacing the compositor.

First step is to allow the NVidia driver to support kernel mode setting:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/zz-nvidia-modeset.conf

Adding

options nvidia-drm modeset=1

And then

sudo update-initramfs -u

Check with

sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset

Then add a startup application

xrandr --output eDP-1-1 --set 'PRIME Synchronization' '1'

Finally switch from gdm3 to lightdm.