04 May 2011
The more that I work from the command line, the more of a nuisance I
find it that all my passwords are in
KeePassX - an excellent GUI
application.
For some time I have intended moving to pwsafe, but am put off by the
time it will take to migrate the data. An alternative is to export the
KeePassX data into an encrypted text file and use the gnupg.vim Vim
plugin to read and edit it. This post describes how to accomplish this
in a very few steps.
05 Apr 2011
I finally decided to upgrade my work desktop to Debian Squeeze:
Preparing for the Upgrade
I manually removed all but the official lenny repositories (and removed
the Debian Volatile repository which is no longer used), and updated
them to “squeeze”:
05 Apr 2011
I want to be able to support my father’s PC remotely via SSH and VNC.
Some people recommend teamviewer, but I prefer the flexibility and
security of ssh, and the fact that this approach is fully open source.
Step 1: Sign up for Dynamic DNS
31 Mar 2011
I have to be careful about the bandwidth I use at work; so I limit the
bandwidth of apt-get and wget.
apt-get
For apt-get you just need to create a new file:
23 Mar 2011
I think there must be something wrong with me. Why, in this age of
graphical user interfaces, does it delight me so much that I can view
textual PDFs within Mutt (on a remote server without a gui)?
To set this up, you need to install pdftotext. This application is
available in either poppler-utils or xpdf-utils - most people seem to
use the latter, but I suspect the former is probably a better option for
a text-only server. I installed poppler-utils.
23 Mar 2011
I have been using Mutt for some time, but have always found it a pain
for handling spam, so I finally spent the time yesterday to work out how
to do it. The surprising thing is that there seemed to be different and
confusing advice on how to achieve this. The best information turned out
to be the Mutt manual itself,
which is a great example of how open source documentation should be.
21 Mar 2011
I confess, I like XKCD. Even though some of them are
unfunny and others beyond my understanding,
sometimes, just sometimes, they
strike a chord.
20 Mar 2011
My brother-in-law’s Buffalo HS-DH500GL NAS (network attached storage)
has failed, it responds to pings, but cannot be accessed via the web
interface, nor by the Windows client software. We reset the device on
multiple occasions, but the reset failed to change the IP address to the
default. We noticed that the rear fan is not working, which suggests
that the device is not in the best of health.
17 Mar 2011
I sometimes find myself wondering what a package’s dependencies are.
This question is usually quickly satisfied with a
$ sudo apt-get install packagename and then aborting, or perhaps more
elegantly $ sudo apt-get -s install packagename to simulate the
installation.
16 Mar 2011
After a couple of weeks on Wordpress, I have decided that I am using
Categories and Tags badly, basically my tags and categories were close
to being the same and I was struggling to know how to use them.
What I have decided is to cut down on the number of categories and treat
these as “feeds”; so I have a technology feed, a Linux feed, a Debian
feed, and only a couple of others. These are the feeds to which I am
committing to maintain, so if you are only interested in my posts on
Linux, you can feel confident about changing your subscription to my
Linux category.
