today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 26, 2025

• Network World ☛ Managing and monitoring user accounts on Linux

  There are a number of commands on Linux that you can use to manage user accounts and monitor user activity. This post provides details on the commands that you need to know if you are managing a Linux server and the user accounts on that system.

• ZDNet ☛ How to compile your first Linux kernel (and 3 reasons why you should)

  I remember the first time I compiled a Linux kernel. I was nervous. It was something I'd never done before, and it seemed like an incredibly difficult task. After all, isn't the kernel the stuff of elite programmers? If so, why would I even bother?

  Because I could.

• Jan-Piet Mens :: SSH keys from a command: sshd's AuthorizedKeysCommand directive

  The program I wire up to this parameter can obtain SSH public key strings (the same lines of data we otherwise encounter in an AuthorizedKeyFile) from whichever source it wants to query. For instance, I could attempt to query an LDAP directory server over a network and fail over to a local (emergency?) list of keys stored in a database local to the server, thereby permitting a small group of administrators to actually login to the server.

  Let’s look at a very simple example of AuthorizedKeysCommand to demonstrate the concept: [...]

• Matching drop shadows across CSS, Android, iOS, Figma, and Sketch

  The CSS and Android examples may look the same, but they’re slightly different. The image below demonstrates that the Android shadow is slightly blurrier. Please note that the Android shadows in this article are generated with setShadowLayer, rather than Material elevation.

• The case for “old school” CSS

  The use case is i18n. If you’re new to Drupal, or someone like me who returned from a long hiatus since Drupal 7, the Drupal documentation SEO is a little messed up if you just Google directly. Largely because Drupal 7 had such a long, long shelf life.

• Phil Eaton on Technical Blogging

  Over the past decade(ish), Phil has “chased his way down the software stack.” Building upon humble beginnings with jQuery and PHP, he later co-founded TigerBeetle and is currently a staff engineer working on Postgres products at EnterpriseDB.

  At every step along the way, he’s been fostering community: dedicating who-knows-how-many hours to spearheading book clubs, meetups, Discord groups, subreddits, and 1:1 chats that benefit education non-profits. He’s also exceedingly generous about sharing his thoughts and learnings with the global community of readers. Since 2018, he’s kept up an impressive cadence of two posts per month, tackling topics ranging from compilers, to community building, to Zig and C.