today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 07, 2024,
updated Jan 07, 2024

• Medium ☛ How to save File in Linux.. | by Hariom Mishra | Jan, 2024 | Medium

  In Linux, you can save a file using various text editors and commands. Here are some common methods: [...]

• HowTo Geek ☛ Photo Privacy on Linux: How to Strip Metadata With exiftool

  Removing sensitive information such as geolocation data, creator and date taken from your images before sharing online increases your privacy.

• The Cat Fox Life ☛ systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer

  Of course, nothing exists in a vacuum. I don’t like the encouragement to link daemons to libsystemd for better integration – all of the useful integrations can be done with more portable measures. And I really don’t like the fact they consider glibc to be “the Linux API” when musl, Bionic, and other libcs exist.

  I’d like to dive into detail on the good and the bad of systemd, as seen through my eyes as all of: end user, administrator, and developer.

• Brandon ☛ Having a virtual machine host server has been quite useful

  I've been using virtual machines for various sorts of testing and scratch development for a long time. For many years, that was done using VMWare Workstation on my work desktop machine, but in early 2022 I reached a tipping point of unhappiness with it and subsequently switched over to Linux's libvirt. It didn't take me long to realize that I could do this on one of our servers, not just my desktop, and I built out a VM host server. Both the VM host server and my desktop have basically the same libvirt setup for (server) testing, where I have a bunch of scratch VMs that are each set up with a starting install of various Ubuntu versions and then snapshotted before we do any post-install customization. When I want to test something on a scratch server, I pick a currently unused VM, roll it back to the appropriate Ubuntu version snapshot, and fire it up to finish installing it as whatever I want.

• Computers Are Bad ☛ usb on the go

  USB, the Universal Serial Bus, was first released in 1996. It did not achieve widespread adoption until some years later; for most of the '90s RS-232-ish serial and its awkward sibling the parallel port were the norm for external peripheral. It's sort of surprising that USB didn't take off faster, considering the significant advantages it had over conventional serial. Most significantly, USB was self-configuring: when you plugged a device into a host, a negotiation was performed to detect a configuration supported by both ends. No more decoding labels like 9600 8N1 and then trying both flow control modes!

• Dan Langille ☛ Creating a Time Capsule instance using Samba, FreeBSD, and ZFS

  This is a rewrite of a previous post on the same subject. I have rewritten it because I created a new jail (tm) and I’m using a different configuration now.

  I recently moved a Time Capsule instance from a FreeBSD host into a jail. Later, I moved to using Samba instead of AFP. Why? Samba seems to be the preferred solution because AFP has been deprecated. It still works, but let’s go Samba.

• James G ☛ How a blog post came to be: Behind the scenes

  I published a blog post earlier today in which I advocate for you to create your own personal website. If you don't have a website, stop reading this post and go read the personal website post. I hope the personal website post encourages you to take up space on the web with your own site. On your website, you can share and publish what interests you without worrying about algorithms or how another platform presents your content or decides in whose feeds your content should go. Anyway, I digress!

  How did my blog post come to be? I want to take you behind the scenes. I will talk about how I wrote the post with help from notes, then reflect on how those notes -- and the contents of the post -- were the culmination of months of thought and experience.

• Workaround for Notion’s lack of heading levels

  I use Notion as my headless CMS for these blog posts. I recently ran into an issue as I need to add fourth heading level (<h4>) to my blog post but Notion doesn’t render a heading if you try to make a level 4 heading. So I had to come up with a workaround.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Moving my cloud VM to Brisbane

  There may some funkiness over the coming day while I cut over. I have a bunch of redundancy when it comes to storage and backups, but I don’t bother with a CDN or anything when it comes to delivering the site. For all my overengineering, all I use is a RAM disk and bunch of reverse proxying to a bunch of FreeBSD jails. Maybe one day I should use a proper CDN, but I like to keep things scrappy and in my control :).