Fairly serious hardware hackers and makers like to post lists of all the gear they use for whatever it is they do (mostly the big-name Youtubers and bloggers who do a lot of retrotech work and reverse engineering). That's all well and good, but I'm just a schmuck from Pittsburgh who likes to mess around with stuff. While cleaning up my office over the holidays I decided that maybe I should put one of those lists together because maybe it would help someone later. So, here is just about every tool that I have sitting on, under, around, or within …
Longtime readers have probably noticed that I have an interest in locksport, or picking locks for the fun of it. As you might imagine, this requires a good deal of buying locks to practice on. From basic practice locks to padlocks, we tend to grab.. well... everything we can find, because there are so many different locks and we try to practice on all of them. While stuck at home waiting for some very long running jobs (multiple hours each) to finish at my dayjob, I decided to keep my hands busy by building myself a lockbox, or a box …
If you have multiple systems (like I do), a problem you've undoubtedly run into is keeping your bookmarks in sync across every browser you use. Of course, there are services that'll happily do this job on you behalf, but they're free, and we all know what free means. If you're interested in being social with your link collection there are some social bookmarking services out there for consideration, including what's left of Delicious. For many years I was a Delicious user (because I liked the idea of maintaining a public bookmark collection that could be useful to people), but Delicious …
GSCA - acronym, verb - Using grep, sed, cut, and awk on a Linux or UNIX box to chop up, mangle, or otherwise process data on the command line prior to doing anything serious with it. This is not to preclude the use of additional tools (such as sort).
UPDATED: Added an Nginx configuration block to proxy YaCy.
If you've been squirreling away information for any length of time, chances are you tried to keep it all organized for a certain period of time and then gave up the effort when the volume reached a certain point. Everybody has therir limit to how hard they'll struggle to keep things organized, and past that point there are really only two options: Give up, or bring in help. And by 'help' I mean a search engine of some kind that indexes all of your stuff and makes it searchable so you …
Some time ago I wrote an article of suggestions for archiving web content offline, at the very least to have local copies in the event that connectivity was unavailable. I also expressed some frustration that there didn't seem to be any workable options for the Chromium web browser because I'd been having trouble getting the viable options working. After my attempt at fixing up Firefox fell far short of my goal (it worked for all of a day, if that) I realized that I needed to come up with something that would let me do what I needed to do …
I've been promising myself that I'd do a series of articles about tools that I've incorporated into my exocortex over the years, and now's as good a time as any to start. Rather than jump right into the crunchy stuff I thought I'd start with something that's fairly simple to use, straightforward, and endlessly useful for many purposes - a wiki.
Usually, when somebody brings up the topic of wikis one either immediately thinks of Wikipedia or one of the godsawful corporate wikis that one might be forced to use on a daily basis. And you're not that off the mark …
A couple of weeks ago before Windbringer's untimely hardware failure I did an article about NASA installing a 3D printer on board the International Space Station and running some test prints on it to see how well additive manufacturing, or stacking successive layers of feedstock atop one another to build up a more complex structure would work in a microgravity environment. The answer is "quite well," incidentally. Well enough, in fact, to solve the problem of not having the right tools on hand. Let me explain.
In low earth orbit if you don't have the right equipment - a hard drive …
If you must assemble any significant quantity of Ikea furniture, do yourself a favor and ignore the tiny and disposable circular wrench and allen key they include in the packaging. Spend a few more dollars to get yourself one or more of the Fixya 17 piece toolkits. It doesn't look like much but the tools are more than sufficient to assemble any furniture that Ikea sells. At the very least you won't tear your hands and wrists to pieces trying to use those tiny wrenches to assemble anything you plan on using every day. You'll also get the job done …
VirtualBox is a (mostly) open source virtualization stack designed to run on desktop machines. While you can run it in a "serious" fashion (such as using VMs to implement your network infrastructure) it really shines if you use it as part of your development effort.
If you want to get under the hood the VBoxManage utility is the first place to start. It lets you do things like convert and manipulate disk images, something that I do from time to time at work these days. Until I ran into the following problem when trying to convert a VMDK virtual disk …
