Now I Know That Technical Thing Too

There are variety of reasons for wanting to setup a proxy connection on your machine. Getting this done on a Windows OS is simple, with tools like HMA! ( Hide My Ass! ) However, the surprise is it is quite easy to get it done on Ubuntu as well. This is for Ubuntu 18.10, I haven't really tried on another OS but the steps would remain the same. Do note that you will need a valid HMA username and password for this to work. There are 3 ways you can connect using HMA, I chose OpenVPN. Steps: First you need to setup OpenVPN on your machine if it is not available already     sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn-gnome Next you need the download the certificate and VPN config files from official HMA website          Download HMA VPN Configs Here! Save it in a folder on your machine and extract it. I prefer ~/vpn_HMA/     cd ~/     mkdir vpn_HMA/ Once you have the extracted folder in place, the next step is to connect to proxy using the Network Manager. It is pres

I installed Linux Mint Qiana 17.2 on my (very old) Acer Aspire laptop. Was pretty surprised that I was not able to adjust the screen brightness using the laptop buttons. The hack I got was as follows, Open terminal (as a superuser) We now need gksudo to edit the grub file You can do gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub   In the text file that opens, look for the line which says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" In the empty quotes i.e. the "" insert the words "acpi_backlight=vendor" The line now looks like this GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor" Remember to save before you close the file Back again in the terminal session, type sudo update-grub Reboot ACPI is Advanced Configuration and Power Interface It is used when the machine starts to control the amount of power given to each device attached to the computer. When we do acpi_backlight=vendor it tries to load vendor drivers before it tries the default generic driver for screen