tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80249922024-03-07T03:52:01.222-05:00Joe's 2¢ TipsJoe's own version of the Linux Gazette's feature, "2 Cent Tips". Collected from around the web, with references where possible. Satisfaction guaranteed or you can go google for yourself.Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-4596592633386697372017-12-22T10:13:00.002-05:002017-12-22T10:29:28.716-05:00It's that time againI won't go off on a rant about how mandatory password change policies are bad for users at best and actually erode security at worst. Or that NIST now recommends against mandatory password changes.
I'm not going to do that because I'm either preaching to the choir or shouting at the sea, demanding the tide stay out. I submit that mandatory password changeJoe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-18758147292690189692017-01-18T09:55:00.000-05:002017-01-18T09:55:09.071-05:00Hello patch-id, my old friend.I started off with a series of patches that I'd cherry-picked out of one branch into my current branch. All seemed good, so I was ready to merge them. Except something happened to the upstream and I was unable to actually push my commits. Now, though, I'm presented with an interesting mess. I have my own series that I know I've tested, the branch from which I've cherry-picked them has a ton of Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-6496630406697700962016-04-01T10:38:00.001-04:002016-04-07T06:06:43.702-04:00tty TypesI have long ago given up on using anything other than GNU Screen as a terminal emulator. If you're reading this I'm confident you know what both of those things are and why I would need them. If not, then you work in a different UNIX-y world than I do. See you next time.
Seriously, though, all of the other emulators I used to use were so fusty and full of so many Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-9280880530537184322016-03-07T13:49:00.001-05:002016-03-07T13:49:27.870-05:00Creating alternativesSomething much bigger I'm probably gearing up to document here (if it works out, since I'm still trying to determine if I've been wasting my time learning this tool or not) inspired me to again check the manpages on a pretty useful little tool: update-alternatives.
It's nothing terribly special, it gets used everywhere, and it's not very difficult to use, but I don't use it as often Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-11862404975523776002016-03-04T11:17:00.001-05:002016-03-07T13:16:42.097-05:00Easy automounting sshfsI use sshfs a lot. Mostly because Norton Commander rocked my world when I first encountered it in the summer of 1994 (bear with me). I was about to say I was done after that, but that's not quite true. In 1996 I discovered pushd/popd (unfortunately limited to bash at the time) and the staggering power of the Korn shell's history editing and I had nearly everything I Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-8035968311212047662014-06-25T13:59:00.001-04:002014-06-25T13:59:47.078-04:00mailman Archives Made UsefulI use mutt for all my email needs. (Not quite true, but I don't count the javascript-fest that is Gmail's interface as an actual mailer.) It's extremely good at doing what I want it to do: presenting text in an easily navigable and reasonably easily searchable format. Yes, I wish I had something that could search my offline mailboxes as efficiently as Gmail's search, but Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-33343954238089105182013-07-27T21:05:00.001-04:002013-07-27T21:05:02.843-04:00Command-line Sound RecordingChances are if you're running the common varieties of Linux or Windows or MacOS you've got a GUI tool already for recording from either your sound card or an internal/external microphone or whatever. Turns out I don't since a while back I gave up on my former infatuation with Ubuntu and Xubuntu. Switching to Crunchbang is a decision I would make again in a heartbeat, but it does Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-86207400863664962322013-07-25T09:45:00.002-04:002013-07-25T09:45:39.565-04:00Stuipd shell trick (or: who's been up-chucking all over my /tmp?)This isn't actually something going mental on my own machine, though it could very well have been, I suppose. I'm doing a lot of work with bitbake these days for work. One of the features I've been spending time with is the PR Service, which, in the absence of any other configuration changes, starts up a process that queries and feeds an sqlite3 database with hashes and revision Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-83636047426539328862013-03-12T21:21:00.003-04:002013-03-12T21:21:57.367-04:00find sucksThere are certainly times when find is useful, but nearly every time I end up doing something like this:
# find . -type f -name foo
That's my age showing, probably. Regardless, one of the old 2¢ Tips I remember from back in the day that I hardly ever used until recently was using locatedb to find stuff on your disk.
Yes, there's absolutely a lot of options in "modern" distributions for Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-29785558993993041632012-09-23T20:58:00.000-04:002013-05-20T21:21:23.246-04:00Automatically pgp-sign outgoing email with muttThere's very little I miss about Evolution. But, yeah, I have my weak moments. Occasionally I'll try to start it up, get frustrated and lose a few hours to the mental trap of "Aw, c'mon, it can't suck this much!".
It does. When you're using it purely to interact with an Exchange server, in particular E2003 and E2010 (the two I've been compelled to interact with at work), it does. When you'd Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-64690042135461375262012-08-18T20:54:00.001-04:002012-08-18T20:54:59.154-04:00Never copy with just 'cp'Something from way back on openbsd-misc@ from Otto Moerbeek. I've long ago lost the reference, unfortunately:
On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Dave Feustel wrote:
My original /usr partition is not big enough to hold OpenBSD source, so I have added another disk to which I have copied (cp -Rp /usr /mnt) and then have untarred source gz files from the 3.6 cdrom to /mnt. My plan is to mount this disk at /Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8024992.post-8774525475034661032012-08-15T14:44:00.003-04:002012-08-15T14:45:06.713-04:00Day ZeroThe Linux Gazette used to have a feature in the Back Page section called 2 Cent Tips. They were small, fun little tricks, usually shell or command related, that made life easier for me. LG is largely defunct now, it seems, but I'm still finding lots of neat little tidbits of information I want to keep around for future reference. So here they are. My own 2 Cent Tips section, culled from the Joe MacDonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14180312881096553072noreply@blogger.com0