Collected here are a load of hints, hacks, and howtos that I have used at some point to get my computers to behave the way I want them to (as opposed to me behaving the way they want me to). Often these only need to be done once, until I do something stupid like upgrading my system. By that time, however, I've usually forgotten the details of how I did whatever I did. So I've started keeping notes. I'm switching to keeping these notes in a blog as the most useful resource that I've found is other people's blogs explaining just how they got the text in their xterms to be mauve. So I've put these here just in case they are useful to someone else.