Timeline
College Students Demand Refunds
Originally published May 20, 2020 @ 1:51 amThe University of Illinois at Chicago students are trying to get a partial refund for tuition and fees paid for on-campus studying that’s been moved online due to the pandemic. A similar situation is developing at other US colleges with lawyers getting involved…Read More
Randomizing Filenames
I had a bunch of folders with some old photos, and I needed to randomize the filenames as an easy way to get a random selection of files. This should’ve been easy, but I made the mistake of googling the answer instead of writing this one-liner myself because I felt…Read More
Finding Gaps in Timestamps
Sometimes knowing when something didn’t happen can be just as valuable as knowing when it did. For reasons yet to be determined, my Salt Master server needs to be bounced occasionally. Not the whole server – just the salt-master service. I needed to find a good time to do this.…Read More
To Mask or Not to Mask
Originally published March 31, 2020 @ 3:17 pmEffectiveness of face masks against the coronavirus has been debated to death in both popular and scientific literature. Here are the two most common mistakes made by journalists and by people who should know better. Asking the Wrong Question “Can Face Masks Prevent…Read More
Checking Linux Account Password
Originally published March 25, 2020 @ 4:48 pmOn occasion you may need to check if an account has a specific password. For example, when you build VMs, you may use some default passwords for some default accounts (i.e. root) that should be changed later by your password management application. Except…Read More
The Coronavirus Digest
Originally published March 22, 2020 @ 1:17 amFor the past few weeks, I’ve been closely following all the news related to the coronavirus. From talking to friends and family I realized that perhaps not everyone has as much free time to trawl the depths of the Internet as I do.…Read More
Coronavirus Stats in Bash
Originally published March 19, 2020 @ 10:37 pmThe result of my morbid fascination with the coronavirus situation is this quick bash script that parses Johns Hopkins University coronavirus data to generate a quick report for the current date for the specified countries. The plan is to add some statistical analysis…Read More
The Coronavirus Update
Originally published March 9, 2020 @ 11:23 amJust as a quick follow-up to my previous post, The Atlantic reports that the Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch predicts that within the next twelve months 40% – 70% of the global population will be infected with the coronavirus and 1% – 2%…Read More
The Coronavirus Discussion
Originally published March 5, 2020 @ 12:42 pmJust a few words about the coronavirus. Clearly, the Internet is in need of my contribution to this topic. You might’ve noticed this: whenever there is a discussion about the coronavirus, some dolt appears out of nowhere and says something along the lines…Read More
Updating Lynis
Originally published February 29, 2020 @ 5:04 pmLynis is an excellent security audit tool for Linux and various Unix derivatives. I have a small wrapper script that runs Lynis via a cron job, does a selective diff with the previous run’s output, and sends me an email. Unfortunately, Lynis does…Read More
Hiding Passwords
Originally published February 21, 2020 @ 9:02 amI’ve touched on this subject previously, but suddenly felt I should repeat myself. The big issue with using passwords from command line is shell history. Regardless of how careful you are, eventually you’ll enter a password in clear text in your terminal session.…Read More
Converting Geofency Data to Google Maps
Geofency is a time and location tracking app for iOS. I’ve been using it for many years to keep track of my whereabouts. At times, this information can come in quite handy. The app does not track your movements continuously. Instead, it uses Geofencing and iBeacon technology, which uses less…Read More
Canyonlands National Park, Utah
In July, some friends and I went on an 8,000-mile overlanding trip to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota. One of the first stops was Canyonlands National Park. Here are some photos from there and other nearby areas we visited on our second week of the adventure.
Reading Multi-Line Input in One Loop Iteration
Bash loops can read the input as words or lines, but what if you needed to accept multi-line input with a single loop iteration? In the following simple example, we randomly select a hundred lines from /var/log/messages and count the number of characters in each line: shuf -n 100 /var/log/messages…Read More
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
In July, some friends and I went on an 8,000-mile overlanding trip to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota. One of the first stops was Yellowstone National Park. Here are some photos from there and other nearby areas we visited on our third week of the adventure.
Convert Code Snippets to PNG
Originally published January 26, 2020 @ 2:50 pmOn occasion I find myself struggling posting code on discussion forums that don’t handle code formatting all that well. What would’ve helped is some quick and easy way to convert code to an image file with syntax highlighting. And so here it is.…Read More
Backup Options for Raspberry Pi
Originally published January 25, 2020 @ 2:45 pmJust about every Raspberry Pi I used suffered the same fate: the micro SD card died. It is generally accepted that the expected lifespan of an SD card is around ten years of normal use. What’s “normal” use for an SD card? It…Read More
Affordable Linux Server
Originally published January 18, 2020 @ 12:44 pmA friend asked me what server I would recommend to run Linux. Yes, a very broad query. After a few followup questions we’ve determined the server will be used to run VMs, or Apache, or a database, or maybe a mail server, or…Read More
Linux Blog Directory
Originally published January 15, 2020 @ 7:29 amA curated list of Linux and Unix blogs from around the world. Scroll To Top Linux Blogs (79) Loading... ( ) 2daygeek Loading... ( 1 ) AddictiveTips Loading... ( 1 ) AdminTome Loading... ( ) BinaryTides Loading... ( ) BlackmoreOps Loading... ( )…Read More
Backing Up WSL Images
Originally published January 4, 2020 @ 3:19 amMicrosoft’s WSL is interesting. I’d go as far as to say that I like it. The mistake here would be to forget that your Linux image is running under Windows, with everything this entails. Making a reliable backup of this thing proved harder…Read More
Home-Brew Ransomware Defense
Originally published December 28, 2019 @ 12:42 amThe first well-known case of ransomware was documented in 1989. The so-called AIDS Trojan was delivered on a floppy disc; encrypted data; demanded $189.00 (nearly four hundred bucks in today’s money) as a “license fee.” The trojan was quickly defused due to its…Read More
Validating HTTPS Cache Peers for Squid
Originally published December 14, 2019 @ 11:52 pmI have a squid proxy server that uses a long list of authenticated cache peers in a round-robin configuration. The process looks something like this: The key to getting this setup working well is to weed out unresponsive cache peers. In my case…Read More
Fuzzy Search with Linux
This is a quick look at several handy utilities that will allow you to find, navigate, and edit directories and files easily. This overview includes such tools as fzf, rg, fd-find, bat, and the fzf.vim plugin for VIM. The fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. 1. The rg –…Read More
Updating PHP 5.6w to 7.1u on CentOS 6.10
Originally published November 23, 2019 @ 11:24 amThis is mostly just a note to self. As I mentioned previously (probably more than once), I very much dislike systemd and will stick with CentOS 6 for as long as possible. Having said that, WordPress dashboard has been nagging me about having…Read More
Analyzing atop Logs with atopsar
Originally published November 22, 2019 @ 5:38 pmI have discussed atop previously but concentrated primarily on how to run it and how to collect data. Now I’d like to spend some time talking about ways to analyze the data collected with atop. Included with the atop package is atopsar –…Read More
