Some time ago I wrote an article about what Keybase is and what it's good for. I also mentioned one of my pet peeves, which is that, by default the fonts used by the Keybase desktop client are way, way too small to see easily on Windbringer. A couple of days ago somebody finally figured out how to blow up the fonts on the desktop, so I can finally see what's going on without putting my nose on the display (and making the mouse cursor jump around because Windbringer has a touchscreen). While I wish that this would be a …
A persistent risk of websites is the possibility of somebody finding a vulnerability in the CMS and backdooring the code so that commands and code can be executed remotely. At the very least it means that somebody can poke around in the directory structure of the site without being noticed. At worst it would seem that the sky's the limit. In the past, I've seen cocktails of browser exploits injected remotely into the site's theme that try to pop everybody who visits the site, but that is by no means the nastiest thing that somebody could do. This begs the …
To scratch a frequently encountered itch, namely mounting and unmounting Truecrypt volumes on USB keys and external drives on a number of systems in a day, I wrote a shell script that automates the command line arguments that I use most often as well as making it simpler to assume root privileges to do so. The script is designed to be kept on the key along with the encrypted datastore, though it could also be placed on each system in a publically accessible location (such as /usr/local/bin)
The script assumes that it'll be run on a UNIX (-alike …
From time to time I find the need to build .iso images of files that have to be burned to CD-ROM disks for storage or transport. However, the CDRtools, while powerful, can be unweildly to work with because of the large number of command line options that each one offers. They can be downright confusing to keep straight in a hurry, which is why I put the most commonly used options for mkisofs into a simple shell script to help speed up the process. You run it like so:
This is a shell script for OpenBSD that will automatically update the source tree for your systemware as well as the ports collection from a public CVS server. This file must be edited to configure the $CVSROOT variable as well as the branch of OpenBSD that you're following (for example, OPENBSD_3_8). It must be run as root, and I'm too busy right now to add a check to make sure that the user running it has root privileges. Use your brain: Put it in /root, mode 0700.
Here's a shell script that makes it simple to burn DVDs on a *nix machine. Requires cdrtools v2.00.0 or greater and a reasonably up-to-date set of dvd+rw-tools. I use v5.19-1.4.9.7 on Leandra. Make it executable with the command chmod 0755 /path/to/burn_dvd and invoke it with burn_dvd /dev/dvd_burner /path/to/files-to-burn.or-iso-image. I've only tested it as root. If this script blows up in your face, it's not my fault or my problem. The script will output usage information if you don't supply any command-line arguments and is well-commented.
