Mahmud Farooque
Freelancer Web Dev and Landscape Shooter
WebDev, LandscapeShooter, Hicker, Traveler
About Me
Development
Photography
Other Skills
Photography Portfolio
A glimpse into my landscape and nature photography work
Latest from the Blog
Notes, build logs, and the occasional deep dive
The Zombie in My GPU: One Friday Night, a Custom NVIDIA Driver, and the Bug Nobody Else Has
A bleeding-edge stack — Arrow Lake-S, kernel 7.0, the NVIDIA open kernel module, KDE Plasma on Wayland — that slept fine and woke up dead one resume in four. This is the war story of the night I stopped waiting for a fix that was never coming, built a custom 610.43.02 driver against my own kernel, registered it with DKMS, and watched the zombie not come back. Honest about the dead-ends, the netconsole blind spot, and the three failed installs along the way.
Why KDE Plasma Survives the NVIDIA Linux Suspend Mess (and Most Other Desktops Often Don't)
Every modern NVIDIA GPU on Linux fires the GSP firmware heartbeat bug on every suspend right now — across Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and Arch. Whether you experience it as a zombie wake depends almost entirely on your compositor. KWin retries until the firmware recovers. Mutter often gives up. Real data, sourced reports, and an open-source logger you can run on your own machine.
How to Keep Your Monitor's Colours Accurate — A Complete Guide for Gamers, Photographers, Printers, and Video Editors
A complete guide to monitor colour accuracy — what to buy, which certifications matter (Calman, Pantone, VESA DisplayHDR, Fogra), how operating systems handle colour, and how to keep your panel accurate for years.
GUI Speed Test for Linux — The Internet Speed Test I Wish Already Existed
Every Linux speed test I tried was broken, browser-bound, or phoning home. So I built one. Fast, native GTK4, four live-working backends (Cloudflare, Ookla, M-Lab, LibreSpeed with a built-in server picker), zero tracking — installs on any distro with one command.
Fixing Avro Phonetic on Linux Wayland — Left Shift, GNOME, KDE Plasma
Avro Phonetic for Linux had a 14-year-old bug that broke the Left Shift key, and Wayland broke input switching entirely. I forked it, fixed the Shift bug, ported the install to GNOME 50+ and KDE Plasma 6, built a GTK4 manager, and shipped it as `ibus-avro-fixed` — one install for both desktops.
Making a Cheap USB Fingerprint Scanner Work on Linux — The CS9711 Story
I bought a $10 USB fingerprint scanner for my Linux desktop and discovered it was not supported. So I built an open-source installer with a GTK4 GUI that makes it work across Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and more.