Amazon comments on the Sparkel machine basically saying no need to buy their A & B packets. The machine comes with 10 each so you can make ten 750ml carbonated water bottles.

I like making my own flavored water and control how much bubblies. Really easy to use. Don't need to buy CO2. I also bought citric acid for $6 and a box of Baking soda instead of buying the refills packets. Super easy just use 1Tbsp of each.

My advice would be to do the hack on you tube and purchase the food grade citric acid and baking soda in place of the packets. Works out to pennies a bottle to carbonate. A tablespoon of each is worth it.


Put the packets on a jeweler's scale. Packet A, citric acid, has a net weight of 11.0 grams (11.3 minus 0.3 empty packet weight). Packet B, sodium bicarbonate, has a net weight of 13.0 grams.

By Buyer on September 16, 2021

You can mix 1 tablespoon of citric acid and 1 tablespoon of baking soda in equal parts…. That is what is in their packets.

By KM on May 18, 2021

You can make the mix yourself using citric acid and baking soda. Google the exact recipe.

By AR on August 27, 2020

Yes, you use one Carbonator per bottle no matter what level you choose. That equals $0.40 - 0.44 per bottle (you can choose to subscribe and save). A CO2 tank will generally cost between $0.43-0.95 per bottle, depending on the level of carbonation you choose. There's no need to return clunky CO2 tanks, just order Spärkel Carbonators online to have them delivered.

By Spärkel on February 10, 2021

Good Question! Spärkel Carbonators are made of a special granulation of citric acid and sodium bicarbonate.

Yes! Just add 1 Tbsp citric acid crystals and 1 Tbsp baking soda. It works great for me. So much cheaper than the carbonators! You don't have to use their special packets, so ignore the company's lies.
By KB on January 10, 2021

ocrmypdf -O 3 input.pdf output_ocr.pdf

-O 3 (letter O not 0 zero) is - - optimize and 3 does aggressive lossy optimizations (including lossy JBIG2)

OCR: 100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 125.0/125.0 [06:56<00:00, 3.33s/page]
WARNING - Some input metadata could not be copied because it is not permitted in PDF/A. You may wish to examine the output PDF's XMP metadata.
JPEGs: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 125/125 [00:14<00:00, 8.29image/s]
PNGs: 0image [00:00, ?image/s]
JBIG2: 0item [00:00, ?item/s]
INFO - Optimize ratio: 1.74 savings: 42.5%
INFO - Output file is a PDF/A-2B (as expected)

PDF is 56MB reduced from 98MB. To use you need to install jbig2 encoder

If you only want to optimize a PDF to reduce size by reducing images then see here https://t.iss.one/geektips/185

inxi shows a short summary of CPU, kernel version, Uptime, Memory usage, Storage, # of processes, shell in use

inix -F shows Full information the computer, CPU temps and fan speeds, etc.

inxi - t cm

shows the top 5 CPU processes and the top 5 memory processes

to view system overview on Linux Mint go to Settings | System Reports and click on System Information (just not color coded that's all)

neofetch
command in the terminal gives you a quick system summer OS, Host, Kernel, Uptime, Packages, Shell, Resolution, DE, WM, GPU, Memory

My invalid perspective and opinion starting 2022. Here’s my hopes / wishes / living on prayers that people realize the following or do the following:

— Get off android and eyefoams eventually. I’m not gonna buy another Apple product again. I may have to replace the battery eventually but it’s the end of the road.

— Switch from MS Office —> LibreOffice

— Cancel all your tv / movie / music subscriptions as they are worthless. Replace that mindless brainwashing entertainment with reading books or listening to audiobooks, podcasts. Purge most of your crap music.

— Telegram has been a huge boon. It can send files in up to 2GB in size. Although I wish channel owners would still reduce the file size. Use -crf 28 and 32kpbs AAC or libopus audio for most videos. If the video is VHS quality old -crf 31 reduces file size even further while mainting quality. Also to upscale to 720p while mainting aspect ration do -vf scale=-2 720p

— Telegram has translation and OCR on images for iOS 15+ and all android phones. Amazing. Apple and google continue to censor certain channels which should show how Communist USA has become. To me this was the most exciting useful technology this year at least on phones.

— Most video sharing services censor or blow chunks. Seems like going forward Odysee might be the winner eventually.

— Get any old laptop with 8G RAM and install Linux Mint XFCE on it. Once you learn to adjust your workflow and transition it’s such a good feeling getting off Apple computers / Mac OS and Windows. Many stick with Windows for gaming hopefully some can also transition as many can use Steam on Linux.

— People will value social lives more than social media. Let’s start reversing and undoing the terrible society we’ve become. Reassess all your values and feel at liberty to start fresh from ground zero.

TestDisk and PhotoRec are both open source data recovery software for FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, ext4, etc partitions.

Both of these are on the bootable ISO image
system-rescue.org

Learn how to use LibreOffice by just using it or reading some of the online documentation or downloading PDF manuals for Base, Calc, Impress, Getting Started, Writer, Draw

https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/

LibreOffice change UI Variant to Tabbed. Go to View | User Inteface. Allows you to quickly see what button does without having to hover over it.

sudo apt install virt-manager

then logout (important for user permissions)

I always used virtualbox.org but Virtual Machine Manager virt-manager.org seems just as good. You can run all your Linux ISO images to test out various distributions. Only thing I got hung up on was how to exit full screen. Just move the mouse to the TOP CENTER of the screen and you'll see an icon to exit full screen.

10 minute or 24 hour temporary email address to sign up for spam or junk without using your real address

https://www.emailondeck.com 60 mins
https://tempail.com 60 mins
https://10minutemail.com 10 mins

The following will last more than a week
https://getnada.com
https://generator.email
https://mytemp.email
https://mail.tm
https://email-fake.com

bforartists - 3D suite to create 3D content

Bforartists is a fork of the popluar open source 3D software Blender. The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a better graphical UI and a better usability. This means a complete switch in the usage philosophy. Away from the hotkey and speed centered usage. Towards a user friendly and intuitive graphical UI.

This makes Blender much easier to use.

draw.io app free online to create diagrams which can be saved as HTML, png, svg (vector). If you like it download the appimage or install deb file.

Listen and find radio stations. Can bookmark favorites and export playlist https://radiolise.gitlab.io/

IPTV (internet TV) here are 7,000+ channels to use in app Hypnotix on Linux MInt
https://github.com/iptv-restream/iptv-channels

just paste the URL with m3u extension into the Provider section

Learning linux command line programs use mankier.com as it'll display the man (manual pages) of most apps. Easier to see with the color syntax highlighting

Covered how to setup VNC to remote control your Linux Mint computer here https://t.iss.one/geektips/13

Another way is to use X2Go
on your linux computer client (windows and Mac clients exist too) It can do remote printing and sound too.

sudo apt install x2goclient 

on the Linux Mint server start openssh daemon

sudo systemctl enable ssh

then install the X2Go server

sudo apt install x2goserver x2goserver-xsession

Now start x2goclient and put in the ip address ifconfig of the server and the username of a user on the linux server along with their password to connect.

Logitech keyboard and mouse can use a universal usb receiver with an orange * indicating you can pair up to six Logitech devices at once. On linux use solaar to pair them

sudo apt install solaar

sudo apt remove blueberry

sudo apt install blueman

Blueberry (comes with Linux Mint) is for bluetooth but isn't as stable as Blueberry which is a applet for gnome-bluetooth which just works reliably. Once you install blueman reboot your computer.

Note: Apple Magic Keyboard won't work properly just a few keys if you have NumLock enabled on laptop.

Remove GNOME file indexing tracker as it slows down the system

sudo apt remove tracker tracker-extract tracker-miner-fs

Then reboot

sudo npm install -g tldr

if you don't have npm and nodejs installed then do

sudo apt install nodejs npm

TLDR (too long, didn't read) is like quick, concise man (manual pages) ..so instead of

man ocrmypdf 

and getting a long manual pages explaining everything in detail with you skimming for the useful options — instead do

tldr ocrmypdf 

and you get this:

ocrmypdf

Generate a searchable PDF or PDF/A from a scanned PDF or an image of text.
More information: https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook.html.

- Create a new searchable PDF/A file from a scanned PDF or image file:

    ocrmypdf path/to/input_file path/to/output.pdf

- Replace a scanned PDF file with a searchable PDF file:

    ocrmypdf path/to/file.pdf path/to/file.pdf

- Skip pages of a mixed-format input PDF file that already contain text:

    ocrmypdf --skip-text path/to/input.pdf path/to/output.pdf

- Clean, de-skew, and rotate pages of a poor scan:

    ocrmypdf --clean --deskew --rotate-pages path/to/input_file path/to/output.pdf

- Set the metadata of the searchable PDF file:

    ocrmypdf --title "title" --author "author" --subject "subject" --keywords "keyword; key phrase; ..." path/to/input_file path/to/output.pdf

- Display help:

    ocrmypdf --help

also can search with -s option

tldr -s configure network

Searching for: configure network

$ docker-network
$ lxc-network
$ az-network
$ networksetup (Available on: osx, osx)
$ ip-link
$ ipconfig (Available on: windows, windows, windows, windows)
$ networkquality (Available on: osx)
$ ip-address
$ git-config
$ nload

Run tldr <command> to see specific pages.

GMIC-Qt 500+ filters.
To use the awesome G'MIC filters download Ubuntu 20.04 debian file.
for Linux Mint 20.3

gmic_3.0.2_ubuntu20-04_focal_amd64.deb

https://gmic.eu/download.html

Or here is the gallery from the homepage which I made into a PDF https://t.iss.one/geektips/160

To see an overview of all the filters GMIC 3.0.0 (released December 2021) can do see here
https://discuss.pixls.us/t/release-of-gmic-3-0/17226