RTL8188 adapter upgrade hell

On my desktop I've been running Linux Mint for the last few years, and have always done the distro upgrade-in-place. This time I tried it and there were too many errors — the upgrade tool wanted to remove around 50 apps, disable all my repos, and generally mess around with my system in too many ways, so I opted to go the "wipe and install fresh" route. My reasoning was also that after 6 years of upgrades, there were probably a few extra files on there, that I didn't need ( a mysterious 3 Gb in the flatpak directory for eg), and I'd messed around with the system config a few times over the time — pipewire, different DNS resolvers etc — so a fresh install would be a good thing. And it was, but for one nightmare: my RTL8188 adapter.

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Digital Ocean spaces vs restic

Very easy answer to a problem that's probably had you cursing for ages. When you set up a DO Spaces instance, you get a URL like https://myspace.eur3.digitaloceanspaces.com/, where eur3 is the datacenter you're in and myspace is the space name you supplied. So you just take that and append s3: to it in your restic … Read more

Node Package Manager install surprise. 387 extra packages!

I've got a server running Ubuntu 20, and wanted to try out something on it with nodejs. I checked on the server and apparently nodejs was already installed. I guess some previous dependency had put it on there a long time ago. node –version v10.19.0apt-cache policy nodejs nodejs: Installed: 10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1 Candidate: 10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1 OK, so the … Read more