Xterm misses the convenient option to resize the fonts with Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> like xfce4-terminal or gnome-terminal do out of the box.

This feature can be added on Debian systems by dropping a configuration snippet into /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-xterm-fontsize:

Any new X session will inherit this configuration and Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> will work to adjust the font size (and taking the window size along).

The font sizes that Xterm iterates through can be viewed on the Ctrl-<right click> context menu:

NB: The context menu allows to switch the fonts on systems where the above snippet has not (yet) been installed. So good enough for a one-off.

Credits: Stack Overflow/Ask Ubuntu, Matthew Hoener.

12 Jan 2026 12:15pm GMT

Secrets Manager for Homelab

For a few years, I've been managing the configuration of a bunch of self-hosted services using Ansible Playbooks. Each playbook needed at least one secret - the sudo password. Many of them needed to manage more (e.g. SMTP credentials for email notifications). Because I've always been paranoid about security, I stored most of those secrets in Ansible Vault, the password for which is stored in only one location - my memory. Therefore, each time I ran any of those playbooks, I'd have to enter two passwords interactively: the sudo password and the Ansible Vault password.

11 Jan 2026 11:57pm GMT

A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN, coming just about two years after the previous maintenance release.

RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change.

This release avoids use of and which are now outlawed under R-devel, and makes a number of other smaller maintenance updates. Just like the previous release, we are at OS_type: unix meaning there will not be any Windows builds at CRAN. If you would like that to change, and ideally can work in the Windows portion, do not hesitate to get in touch.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.10 (2026-01-11)

• Minor maintenance for continuous integration files, README.md

• Switch to Authors@R in DESCRIPTION

• Use Rf_setAttrib with R 4.5.0 or later

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

11 Jan 2026 10:57pm GMT