The following post was graciously contributed by guest author, Ruben F I was only going to do this on my own PC but then I thought that other people may want to do the same. As of today, I’m using Ubuntu (14.04) Trusty LTS. Uname -a 3.13.0-68-generic #111-Ubuntu SMP Fri Nov 6 18:17:06 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64… Read More »

Problem: When you run `apt-get update`, you get an error similar to: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 5C808C2B65558117 The solution: ? ? ? https://github.com/tommybutler/apt-key-install You can fix it with a series of one-off commands that you’ll probably not memorize and always end up googling…  Or, you can… Read More »

There’s a multitude of reasons to use the GNU Privacy Guard utility (gpg for short) to protect whatever information you want to keep private.  This tutorial shows you how to set up your PGP key pair in Linux using the GUI.

Nearly all hard drives in the last several years come with a technology called S.M.A.R.T. which gives you, to put it very simply, a way to see how healthy the drives are. You can get a surprisingly large amount of information from your hard drives about their health status–even a log of the drive’s health… Read More »

exifsort –source ~/unsorted/media/files –dest ~/Photos When you take a picture with your digital camera or smartphone, a time stamp is embedded in the file.  Other cool types of info are also embedded, but that’s not in the scope of what I’m covering here. I wrote a tool in Perl called exifsort.  It takes a directory… Read More »

Do you run VMware Workstation on your Linux machine?  I do.  A lot.  So much in fact that I’ve found it necessary to do things with VMware workstation that it doesn’t do on its own.  Maybe in time it will change and add such features, but for now you can’t auto-start VMs on boot.  Well,… Read More »

The Use Case I recently found myself in need of a way to escalate privileges for only one user on my system (me), for the purpose of running only one script without prompting for a password.  It made sense to run the script setuid and have the code enforce the policy that I alone am… Read More »

This script will offline and remove a hard drive from your Linux machine.  That doesn’t mean it physically pulls it out of your server 😉  Instead the script spins down the disk, removes it from your server’s list of devices under /dev, and powers it off. This is really handy if your system keeps locking… Read More »

Lacuna Expanse is a fun, free MMORPG I got involved in a few months back.  It is written in Perl, which is how I came to know about it in the first place.  It uses XMLRPC, AJAX, JSON, all kinds of cool technologies, and it also exposes an open API to script against.  What’s even… Read More »

This post is somewhat inspired by the fact that Google+ now makes cool little gif animations from photo bursts of 5 pics or more when you upload.  Very nifty.  But, ugh, the images are SMALL and often choppy.  What if you want larger picture dimensions, smoother or longer animations?  For those who care about making… Read More »