My Little Pocket Universe
Posts about linux in general that are not tied to a specific distro.
I was looking for a way to compare compression ratios with different algorithms, and didn’t want to have to run them in serial. So I started digging and found a nice bash syntax that allows you to do just that. And just for fun, it calculates the sha checksum as well. curl -s https://someserver.com/file.txt | … Read more
A while back, I found a nice TrueType font that mimicked the old DEC terminals. It was made by taking the ROMs of a DEC VT220, and creating the TTF font based on that data. It occurred to me that it would also make a really great replacement for the linux console font, where it … Read more
Sometimes it’s desirable to have a back door into a system that is behind a firewall. ssh is a security person’s best friend, and worst nightmare. This is more in the latter category, but as an admin, incredibly useful. I have a server that I can get outbound connections to anywhere, but do not have … Read more
When I was installing Ubuntu linux, I tried to set up 20.04.2 with LACP bonding during the install, and the installer kept crashing. So, to get through the install, I just configured one port with the basic info, and then updated the OS after to have the bonding. I do recommend that you make the … Read more
Traditionally, on *nix systems, cron (or one of its derivatives) is used. It’s possible to use cron on the Mac, but it’s deprecated. launchd is the preferred method. The set up is a little more complex because it’s a bit of XML code, but it’s very straightforward. See the launchd.plist man page or the launchd … Read more
For some strange reason, in the land of the internet when people create books with flowable text (i.e. novels), they use the PDF format, which is simply awful for the medium. Yet when they have a content that lends itself perfectly to the PDF format, like comics, they instead use an unnecessary made-up format that … Read more
Steps I do when I am setting up a new Raspberry Pi. If using the official LCD screen, for some unknown reason, it still defaults to an upside-down orientation when hooked up. This is simple to fix. Edit /boot/config.txt and add the following line: lcd_display=2 The 2 rotates it 180º (the most likely choice for … Read more
Install gpsd and chrony (chrony should already be installed) Connect your GPS and determine its device name. If it is a USB GPS, the easiest way to do that is to do an ls in /dev, then plug in the device, and do another ls and see what changes. The device name will likely be … Read more
If you use a Mac and create SAMBA shares on linux hosts, you’re bound to find lots of .DS_Store files. They are, in and of themselves, harmless; they just store custom window information for the MacOS Finder. But if you prefer to have that information not saved rather than finding those files, you can prevent … Read more
Finding good documents on how to set up a site-to-site VPN with a Ubiquiti UDM to a non-Ubiquiti node (i.e. linux) has been a challenge. The documents on Ubiquiti’s site are laughably incomplete (and generally way out of date). So I am working through each of the steps and trying to shoe horn in a … Read more