Month: December 2023

Changing the webcam’s default power-line frequency

The default powerline frequency for the Logitech C270 webcam is 60Hz, which causes flickering. It can be changed manually via v4l2-ctl or cameractrls, but the change isn’t permanent. To persist the change, we need to create a udev rule. Put the following lines in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-logitech-default-powerline.rules:

# 046d:0825 Logitech, Inc. Webcam C270
SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", KERNEL=="video[0-9]*", ATTR{index}=="0", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0825", RUN+="/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -d $devnode --set-ctrl=power_line_frequency=1"

power_line_frequency value 1 corresponds to 50Hz, 2 to 60Hz and 0 disables the anti-flickering algorithm.

How to Display Battery Percentage for Bluetooth Headphones in GNOME

By default, the Power tab in GNOME’s Settings does not show the battery percentage for Bluetooth headphones like the Sony WH-1000XM3. However, you can enable this feature by activating the DBUS interface of Bluez, the Linux Bluetooth protocol stack. The DBUS interface is hidden behind the --experimental flag for the Bluez service. To enable it, follow these steps:

  1. Create an override file for the bluetooth service:
$ sudo systemctl edit bluetooth

This command will create the file /etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.d/override.conf.

  1. Add the following lines to the file:
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd --experimental

Note that both ExecStart= lines are required.

  1. Restart the Bluetooth service.
Battery percentage for Sony WH-1000XM3 under Settings->Power