I find the occasional BEEEEP coming from my PC speaker extremely annoying. My irritation is amplified tenfold by the fact that my ThinkPad's speaker is very, VERY loud.

After playing Whack-a-Mole for some time, attempting to disable the audible bell in various environments, I decided to take more destructive action.

To temporarily disable the Clangy McBangy, run the following command in the terminal:

sudo rmmod pcspkr

To prevent the speaker from loading at boot, you can blacklist the module. Create or edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/nosound.conf (or any suitable name) and add the following line:

OpenSSH is an amazing piece of software that continually surprises me.

Did you know that you can run a SOCKS proxy with just a single command?

ssh -D 9090 example.com

To configure your browser (I'm using Firefox as an example):

• Go to Settings ▶ Network Settings ▶ Manual Proxy Configuration
• Set the browser's proxy to SOCKS v5 localhost:9090
• Enable Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5

Then, you can visit:

• What Is My IP
• DNS Leak Test

This is a software monopoly but at least it was written by people who care about security, so it's not like Microsoft's monopoly.

I often accidentally touched the touchpad while typing, which led to the unintended activation of various UI elements.

I generally dislike touchpads; they feel like a useless invention, much like touchscreens in cars.

After some searching, I found a useful utility that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad while typing:

syndaemon

  syndaemon -i 1 -K -R -d -t -p /tmp/syndaemon.pid

• -i - specifies the wait time after typing stops
• -K - ignore modifier keys
• -R - uses the XRecord extension to avoid keyboard polling
• -d - daemon
• -t - disables tapping and scrolling only
• -p - creates a PID file

Since I use i3, I added the following to my i3 configuration: