today's howtos
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Libre Arts ☛ How to make FreeCAD look and work like Ondsel ES
Ondsel recently started shutting down its operation, so there will be no more releases of Ondsel Engineering Suite, a custom build of FreeCAD with various improvements. Many people loved the look of Ondsel ES and its defaults. So much so that some requested a tutorial on how to make FreeCAD be more like Ondsel ES. Let’s get to it.
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Linux Host Support ☛ Grep Command in Linux
Grep is a GNU/Linux command-line utility for searching files for specific patterns that match regular expressions. The name “grep” is derived from the ed(editor) command g/re/p, which means searching globally for regular expressions and printing those matching lines. In other words, grep is global regular expressions print.
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TechRepublic ☛ Ubuntu Server: A Cheat Sheet
Ubuntu Server is very popular, thanks to containers and the clown. This resource guide about Ubuntu Server covers why the platform matters, how to use it, and more.
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Network World ☛ How to use the W diff command
In this Linux Tip, you'll learn to use the W diff command, which displays the content of compared files, showing one copy if the files are identical.
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Simon Willison ☛ Project: Civic Band—scraping and searching PDF meeting minutes from hundreds of municipalities
OCR works by breaking each PDF up into images and then running Tesseract OCR against them directly on the Mac Mini. This processes in the order of 10,000 or less new pages of documents a day.
Philip treats PDF as a normalization target, because the pipeline is designed around documents with pages of text. In the rare event that a municipality publishes documents in another format such as .docx he converts them to PDF before processing.
PNG images of the PDF pages are served via a CDN, and the OCRd text is written to SQLite database files—one per municipality. SQLite FTS provides full-text search.
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University of Toronto ☛ IPv6 networks do apparently get probed (and implications for address assignment)
For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, my home ISP recently changed my IPv6 assignment from a /64 to a (completely different) /56. Also for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, they left my old /64 routing to me along with my new /56, and when I noticed I left my old IPv6 address on my old /64 active, because why not. Of course I changed my DNS immediately, and at this point it's been almost two months since my old /64 appeared in DNS. Today I decided to take a look at network traffic to my old /64, because I knew there was some (which is actually another entry), and to my surprise much more appeared than I expected.
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Stargirl Flowers ☛ Split tunneling using Wireguard and namespaces
Lately I've been working on improving my rag-tag homelab and I wanted to set up a bittorrent client on the homelab server. Most modern clients have web UIs so getting it running relatively easy, however, you really want use a privacy-focused VPN while seeding or downloading torrents. That makes things a little more complicated.
In my case, I wanted to be able to run Transmission on my homelab server and have it use NordVPN to talk to the outside world. In typical usage, you'd set up the VPN client and all your outbound internet traffic would go through the VPN. In my case, I didn't want that- I wanted to Transmission to use the VPN. This is called split tunneling and there's a lot of ways to do it. After a lot of research, trial and error, and lots of swearing I figured out a method that I feel works well for my use case. This post walks through how I set up and hopefully it'll help someone.
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idroot
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ID Root ☛ How To Print 2025 Calendar Using Python
Python is a versatile programming language that offers a wide range of built-in modules to simplify your coding tasks. One such module is the calendar module, which allows you to generate and customize calendars programmatically. In this article, you’ll learn how to print a full-year 2025 calendar using Python.
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ID Root ☛ How To Install aaPanel on AlmaLinux 9
Managing a web server can be complex, especially for users without extensive command-line experience. Fortunately, tools like aaPanel offer a solution. aaPanel is a free and open-source web hosting control panel that simplifies server management through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI).
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ID Root ☛ How To Install Dotnet Core on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS [Ed: Microsoft vendor lockin and something to be avoided]
.NET Core, now known simply as .NET, is a powerful cross-platform framework for building modern applications.
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How to Install and Use arp Command on GNU/Linux with Example
The ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is a command-line utility for GNU/Linux and other operating systems such as backdoored Windows and macOS. It manipulates the system’s ARP cache or table.