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Recently, my washing machine (a cheap and cheerful Beko WM5101w) started to sound like a banshee when on a spin cycle. I’m a pretty hands on kind of guy, so I thought I’d take it apart and replace the bearings.

After some searching, I managed to find a bearing and seal kit for about £20. Bargain! I spent some time taking necessary bits off the machine – weights, pulley etc. Only to find that the outer drum is welded together. This means the inner drum can’t be removed and the bearings can’t be replaced. This is fairly common on washing machines in the last few years apparently. Just an FYI.

Are washing machines built to fail?
Washing machine welded drums why you can’t change the bearings

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Update – see here for Mint 20+)
I’m pretty much settled on XFCE for my older machines and Cinnamon for the newer. My last post was about customising the XFCE Whisker menu. This one, as you may have guessed, is about Cinnamon.

The Cinnamon menu is fairly un-customisable from the GUI. It works pretty well, but I wanted bigger category icons. After some digging I found the config file which controls this – 

/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/menu@cinnamon.org/applet.js

In this file, look at lines 28-30

 const MAX_FAV_ICON_SIZE = 32;
 const CATEGORY_ICON_SIZE = 32;
 const APPLICATION_ICON_SIZE = 24;

These contain the pixel size for the favourite icons, category icons and application icons. I’ve changed mine to the above. You might want to make a copy of this file before modification and after as it will likely be overwritten by an update at some point.

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Whisker menu is a nice, customisable menu/launcher type thing mainly used in XFCE. My main problem with it is that it draws itself as an app window, so isn’t affected in the same way as actual menus by XFCE themes.

This site has some information on the CSS needed to customise it. I’m not going to cover the same ground, except to say you need to put your custom CSS in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and run xfce4-panel -r afterwards.

Here’s mine. Suck it and see.

whiskermenu-window {
background-color: #404040;
color: #ccc;
}
/* Make sidebar buttons match */
whiskermenu-window button {
background-color: #404040;
color: #ccc;
}
whiskermenu-window button:hover {
background-color: #808080;
color: #000;
}
whiskermenu-window button:checked {
background-color: #808080;
color: #000;
}
/* Make treeview match */
whiskermenu-window treeview {
background-color: #959595;
color: #222;
}
whiskermenu-window treeview:hover {
background-color: #404040;
color: #fff;
}
whiskermenu-window border{
border-color: #444444;
color: #fafafa; 
}