today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 07, 2025

• Tom's Hardware ☛ How to rip your DVDs with Handbrake — preserve your DVD library before bit rot claims another victim

  The humble Digital Versatile Disc, DVD, has been with us since the 1990s, and while it may not offer the clarity of Blu-ray, it is cheap and plentiful. Go into any thrift store, dollar store, yard sale, or charity shop, and you will find a plethora of DVDs, often at bargain prices. In the age of streaming, where your favorite series or movie can move from one service to another, or even cease to exist, ripping DVDs is the best way to archive what you want to watch. Not what an algorithm thinks you want to watch.

  Backing up your DVD collection is also useful, given that “bit rot” — where the aluminum layer of the discs flakes away — is common in older discs. If your discs are not stored in a temperature-controlled environment (your loft/attic gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter) or you just happen to have a bad disc, your collection will disintegrate inside its cases.

• APNIC ☛ A first look at the adoption of BGP-based DDoS scrubbing services: A five-year longitudinal analysis

  An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown. This lack of visibility hinders the ability to assess how effectively the Internet can mitigate large-scale DDoS attacks and maintain service availability for legitimate traffic. We therefore developed a methodology that sheds light on the adoption of the top five global BGP-based DDoS scrubbers from 2020 to 2024. This post is the summary of the paper we presented at the International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM’25).

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0163 /tmp is bad

  Beware of 'temporary' folders of any nature. Your Desktop and Downloads are temporary folders. Don't store things there. You'll lose them, or you'll be frustrated as you have to look for them.

  Doing the right thing takes an extra ten seconds.

• Herman Õunapuu ☛ The day IPv6 went away

  I take pride in hosting my blog on a 13-year old ThinkPad acting as a home server, but sometimes it’s kind of a pain. It’s only fair that I cover the downsides of this setup in contrast to all the positives.

• University of Toronto ☛ A problem for downloading things with curl

  If curl is directed straight to the final URL, 'curl -O' alone is enough to get the right file name. However, if curl goes through a redirection, there seems to be no option that will cause it to re-evaluate the 'remote name' based on the new URL; the initial URL and the name derived from it sticks, and you get a file unhelpfully called 'tarball' (in this case). If you try to be clever by running the initial curl without -O but capturing any potential redirection with "-w '%{redirect_url}\n'" so you can manually follow it in a second curl command, this works (for one level of redirections) but leaves you with a zero-length file called 'tarball' from the first curl.

• Andy Bell ☛ Some practical examples of view transitions to elevate your UI

  It is incredibly powerful, and one could write quite the book (or several) explaining all the features and intricacies. There is plenty of surface-level view transition content on the web, but today we’ll be getting hands-on with some examples. Thus, for the sake of brevity and in the Piccalilli way, I won’t be covering every nuance but instead covering some cases and applicable patterns that you can use to apply view transitions in the real world.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install LXQt Desktop on Debian 13

    Debian 13 “Trixie” brings exciting improvements to the GNU/Linux ecosystem, and choosing the right desktop environment can significantly enhance your computing experience. LXQt stands out as an exceptional choice for users seeking a lightweight, modern, and highly efficient desktop environment that performs exceptionally well on both contemporary and aging hardware.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install SQLite on Debian 13

    SQLite stands as one of the most widely deployed database engines in the world. Unlike traditional database management systems that require complex server setups, SQLite operates as a lightweight, self-contained SQL database engine. This makes it an excellent choice for developers, system administrators, and technology professionals working on Debian 13 systems.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Fwupd on Debian 13

    Keeping your GNU/Linux system’s firmware updated is essential for security, performance, and hardware compatibility. Firmware updates patch vulnerabilities, improve device stability, and ensure your hardware operates at its best.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install WoeUSB on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

    Creating bootable backdoored Windows USB drives on Ubuntu systems has become an essential skill for GNU/Linux users who need to install backdoored Windows on different machines or maintain dual-boot systems. WoeUSB emerges as the premier solution for this task, offering both graphical and command-line interfaces that make the process accessible to users at all skill levels.