Technical Stuff

I always forget how to do this, so why not create a quick page to remind myself. Logged in through the GUI it is easy to use thunar, but from the command line I use these steps: # create the luks volume sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdc1 Verbatim1TB # mount the disk like thunar udisksctl mount -b /dev/mapper/Verbatim1TB Voila!

https://www.devin.com/lookbusy/ Lookbusy is super awesome. It doesn't just take the CPU to 100% like other utilities.. Wtih AWS, especially t2.small instances, I want to play with the cpu around the credit burning limit and this tool allows me to do that so easily.  I'm not sure how the curve works yet, but I'm going to explore that next.     wget 'https://www.devin.com/lookbusy/download/lookbusy-1.4.tar.gz'     tar zxvf lookbusy-1.4.tar.gz     ./configure     make     ./lookbusy --cpu-uti=45-55 --cpu-mode=curve     ./lookbusy --cpu-uti=15-25 --cpu-mode=curve  # t2.small     ./lookbusy --cpu-uti=19

Rather than encrypted every backup file individually I find it useful to just put an ecryptfs overlay on a couple of directories and just write directly to them letting ecrypt take care of the encryption. In this example, I have a local drive that I write my daily incremental gnu tar file to.  I then rsync that directory's contents to a mirror directory house on the IT microsoft network drive.  This code snipet mounts the 2 ecrypt directories.  I run this after rebooting my box since I don't want  to store the passphrase anywhere. ECRYPT_OPTIONS="key=passphrase,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=32,ecryptfs_passthrough=n,ecryptfs_enable_filename_crypto=n" sudo mount -t ecryptfs /scratch/myuser/encrypted /scratch/myuser/encrypted                                   -o "${ECRYPT_OPTIONS}" || exit 4 sudo mount -t ecryptfs /mnt/dos/home/myuser/MyDocuments/encrypted /mnt/dos/hom...

To see what you are configured for now:     xdg-settings get default-web-browser Then to find that file:     locate `xdg-settings get default-web-browser` For me that was     /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop I started with that file and edited so it called chrome the way I do (I run multiple sessions of chrome and wanted a default open to go to a specific one.     cp /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop  ~/.local/share/applications/custom-google-chrome.desktop Edit that file to your liking and then set xdg (NO PATH to the file)   xdg-settings set default-web-browser custom-google-chrome.desktop Now test   xdg-open https://www.google.com

The devilspie2  utility is really awesome.  Primarily I use it to keep my browser windows in place and at the right size for my screens.  Caution, these settings are for 4k monitors. Firefox is tricky because I want my compose windows for OWA to be small but I don't get a lot of window information from Firefox. I use separate configuration for google-chrome and that makes it convenient to ID the right window. -- debug_print command does only print anything to stdout -- if devilspie2 is run using the --debug option debug_print("----------------------------------------------------------") debug_print("Window Name:                  " .. get_window_name()); debug_print("Application name:             " .. get_application_name()); debug_print("get_window_geometry():        " .. get_window_geometry()); debug_print("get_window_client_geometry(): " .. get_window_client_geometry());...

This is my primary work computer. I recently decided to switch from Fedora to Xubuntu. I still like Fedora, but we are using more Ubuntu at work and I need to get myself more familiar with that way of doing things. I am copying a lot of the configuration that I did with my Sager NP9758 laptop configuration. After updating an rebooting, I enabled the Nvidia binary drivers and Intel binary blob. Next step let's get google chrome on here as well as firefox http://askubuntu.com/questions/510056/how-to-install-google-chrome wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add - sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list' sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install google-chrome-beta Apparently installing beta Google Chrome results in a second apt source being created. This causes an error when running `sudo apt-get update`. To fix `sudo v...

This is my new baby: 15.6" 4K QFHD Matte Display with G-SYNC Technology (3840 x 2160) Guaranteed no dead or partially-lit pixels for first 30 days of purchasing Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M GPU with 8GB GDDR5 Video Memory 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Processor ( 8MB Smart Cache, 3.40GHz) IC Diamond Thermal Compound - CPU + GPU Windows® 10 Home 64-Bit Edition Preinstalled 16GB Dual Channel DDR4 SDRAM at 2133MHz- 2 X 8GB 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SSD (as Storage Drive) 1TB 7200rpm SATA2 Hard Drive Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 M.2 AC Wireless LAN + Bluetooth Module 230W 110V/240V autoswitch AC Adapter I chose this guy as primarily a Linux workstation.  This laptop has a desktop CPU and a mobile Nvidia GPU.  Most importantly, though, the Nvidia chip doesn't use Optimus.  While the newer Nvidia binary blob drivers handle Optimus better (I've had some success with an older Alienware laptop with Optimus.)  But I definitely didn't want ...