Category: Tips
iPGMail - Email Encryption on your iOS Device
Although there does not appear to be as well-integrated an approach to email encryption on iPhone as there is for Android in K9/APG, there is a fully functional approach which is relatively simple to setup. Unfortunately this is a paid app (iPGMail - $1.99) but it seems to be the...
Updating an initramfs Image in Debian or Fedora
If you make a change to a configuration file that needs to be reflected in your Linux boot process (such as mdadm.conf), you'll need to add it to your initramfs image. This process varies by distribution (although most that I have used share the method I describe for Debian). To...
Focus Follows Mouse in Gnome Shell
Having recently moved my desktop to Fedora 15 I am now using Gnome Shell (more on this later). However, as with many of the configuration settings for Gnome, having focus follow mouse is no longer something you can set using installed graphical programs. Fortunately, a one line command can rectify...
Linux Filesystem and No Space With 150 Gigabytes Left
You read that right. Today I had a partition with over 150 gigabytes of space left on it and a drive error reporting that said partition was full. Not only that, but this was an important partition for me, the one that I keep in a mirrored RAID because it...
Reset a Terminal in Linux
Sometimes when you are working in your Bash terminal, something goes wrong. It might have been a program that output strange symbols, or maybe you ran the cat command on a binary file. But, no matter how it happened, it can make your terminal essentially useless until you restart it....
Privacy on Android: Importing a Public Key from a Keyserver with APG
Now that you've set up APG and K9 to allow you to send and receive encrypted and signed emails from your Android phone, you've probably found that you need to import OpenPGP keys. Fortunately, if the keys you need can be found on keyservers, APG can download and import them...
Finding the Gateway for Your Linux Computer
If you are setting up a static IP address for a computer and need the gateway, finding the gateway address is simple, if you have a computer already setup on the network. Below is a command which you can run on the configured computer to find the IP address of...
How to Fix a Shutdown From the Past Locking Out Users
Last night as I was upgrading my new server, I ran the command shutdown -h 00:10. Before the shutdown could complete, something interrupted my ssh session. As a result, when I tried to log back in, I received the following message: `The system is going down on Thu Jun 2...
Why OpenOffice Documents on NFS Won't Open and a Simple Fix
I keep most of my files on my server because I've around a terabyte of space available. In order to access directories that I regularly need, I use NFS to share out the drives. Unfortunately, for the past several months, opening OpenOffice documents resulted in a considerable delay, before OpenOffice...
How to Pause Linux Command Line Programs
With a CPU or RAM intensive program running in terminal, sometimes you need to be able to pause the program in order work on something else for a bit, like browsing the web. All of this was done in BASH, other shells may or may not work. Of course, programs...
Enhancing Security of Your Passwords with Keyfiles
Some programs that use encryption to protect your data allow you to enter a file to be used as a keyfile as well as using a password to decrypt your data. This greatly increases security for the data because it would require an attacker not only to have the password...
Speed Up Audio Files
In the recent article about [extracting the audio from videos](/extracting-audio-videos.html) I detailed a method to get the audio track from a video. One use for this is extracting the audio of recorded lectures that universities or professors have placed online and are made freely available. Many of these lectures can...
Extracting Audio from Videos
During the break before my next semester, I've been trying to study a bit, both in preparation for classes I am taking next semester, and to prepare for a CLEP exam I plan to take soon, in order to reduce the total number of classes I need to take. One...
Remove a Word From Firefox's Dictionary
Typos often happen, even to the best of typists. Unfortunately these typos can be added to the spell check with a simple clicko as you attempt to correct your typo. Fortunately, its relatively easy to fix this mistake, even if it is a bit of a pain. You will have...
Using a Ramdisk on /tmp
Just the other day, I wrote about [using ramdisks](/making-and-mounting-ram-disk.html). I briefly touched on mounting at boot with the fstab file. One possible use for this is mounting a ramdisk for the /tmp directory, which increases the read/write speeds for often used temporary files. After around a week of using this...
Making and Mounting a RAM Disk
As fast as they are, sold state drives aren't really my thing. Not that I don't want one, but rather the cost of the drive simply isn't worth the benefits. Of course, there are times when fast read/write times can be hugely beneficial. Take, for instance, video processing. The faster...
Remove Highlighting After Vim Search
Depending on your configuration files, you might find that Vim highlights search results, sometimes keeping the highlighting the next time you open the file. This highlighting remains until you search again, or you turn it off. Of course, if you don't know how to turn it off, you have to...
Adding an Alias to Fedora
For some reason, Fedora comes with vim, but calls vi, even though it is the full `vim` program rather than the older `vi`. Given that the other systems that I have use the standard name for vim (you know, calling `vim` `vim` instead of `vi`. So, the only good solution...
Sleep Inhibit Applet For Fedora Gnome
When I installed Fedora, I went looking to add the sleep inhibit applet to my panel, but discovered that unlike the install on Ubuntu, this applet is not included by default. This applet comes in handy when you are watching a video on your computer, preventing the screen from turning...
Amarok Rescans Collection After Suspend
Recently I discovered that unlike my Gentoo configuration, and the Ubuntu installation that preceded the Gentoo install, I now can suspend my computer having installed Fedora. However, soon after I started doing this on a regular basis I noticed that Amarok was also regularly having to rescan my entire music...
Update Ubuntu With Aptitude
For some reason, trying to update my Ubuntu server with `apt-get upgrade` often fails to install all the available updates. In a similar quirk, the default update client for Ubuntu on my laptop usually fails to install updates. After experimenting with various methods for updating a bit, I finally discovered...
Combining Two Mpeg (or Other Video Types) Files With Ffmpeg
Combining two video files in an graphical editor is easy, but what if you had reason to combine several dozen videos at once? Unless that editor has some form of scripting you can use, the process could take hours. On the other hand, combining the files in command line is...
Escape a Space in Linux Configuration Files
A few years ago, I discovered that mounting a network drive that had a space in the name was quite tricky. The problem is, `fstab` neither detected the space automatically, nor when I put a backslash in front of the space would it escape the way it would in terminal....
Get Focus Follows Mouse Mode in Fedora
I don't like the conventional way of changing a window's focus by clicking within it. Some time ago, I read about the concept of focus follows mouse, in which to change the window currently in focus, you simply point your cursor at it. Needless to say, on systems without this...