today's howtos
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Darek Kay ☛ Style your RSS feed
RSS is not dead. It is not mainstream, but it's still a thriving protocol, especially among tech users. However, many people do not know what RSS feeds are or how to use them. Most browsers render RSS as raw XML files, which doesn't help users understand what it's all about: [...]
In this post, I'll explain how to style RSS feeds and educate readers at the same time.
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TecMint ☛ How to Keep Linux Process Running After a Crash or Reboot
But guess what? There are cool ways to make sure programs stay alive, even when tricky things happen. Let’s check out some easy ways to make sure your programs can handle tough situations in Linux.
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Marc Amos ☛ Have you ever tapped an RSS/ATOM feed link?
Did you know you can transform that with HTML and CSS to make it much nicer on the eyes? Me neither! Well, now I know, thanks to a blog post by Darek Kay.
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Xe's Blog ☛ How to reboot a Linux system into the BIOS
This will force it to go into the BIOS so you can change settings or update the BIOS.
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University of Toronto ☛ An old Unix mistake you could make when signaling init (PID 1)
Historically there have been a number of reasons for the system administrator to send signals to init, which you can still see documented for modern Unixes in places like the FreeBSD init(8) manual page. One of them was to reread the list of serial ports to offer login prompts on and often in the process to re-offer logins on any ports init had given up on, for example because the serial getty on them was starting and exiting too fast. Traditionally and even today, this is done by sending init a SIGHUP signal.
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[Old] Raspberry Pi ☛ Host a Wi-Fi hotspot with a Raspberry Pi
You can use a Raspberry Pi to connect to hotel Wi-Fi once, then broadcast a separate network to all of your devices. With this setup, you won’t have to configure Wi-Fi for all of your devices every time you visit a hotel. Instead, you can set them up once, and then every time you go to a hotel, your devices will automatically connect to the Raspberry Pi’s network.
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University of Toronto ☛ MFA today is both 'simple' and non-trivial work
Basic MFA is ostensibly pretty simple these days. You get a trustworthy app for your smartphone (that's two strikes right there), you scan the QR code you get when you enable MFA on your account, and then afterward you use your phone to generate the MFA TOTP code that you type in when logging in along with your password. That's a little bit more annoying than the plain password, but think of the security, right?
But what if your phone is lost, damaged, or unusable because it has a bulging battery and it's taking a week or two to get your carrier to exchange it for a new one (which happened to us with our work phones)? Generally you get some one time use special codes, but now you have to store and manage them (obviously not on the phone). If you're cautious about losing access to your phone, you may want to back up the TOTP QR code and secret itself. Both the recovery codes and the TOTP secret are effectively passwords and now you need to handle them securely; if you use a password manager, it may or may not be willing to store them securely for you. Perhaps you can look into age.