Time has an article about 51 things we, along with scientists, businesses and governments, can do to slow global warming and cut carbon emissions. “Here is our guide to some of the planet’s best ideas” This is getting more and more press of late thanks to Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvienent Truth, [...]

Netcat (nc) is a “…simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable back-end” tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, [...]

This may only apply to those of us geeks that use vim to admin servers daily, but today I needed a way to backup, and automate the creation of backup and tmp directories to house those ever annoying ~ and .swp files from showing up in my working directory ($PWD). I didn’t want to [...]

I came across this page again, seems they took my advice to heart on the one line command to grep out a list of all installed packages on a Debian or Ubuntu system. This creates a file that you can use as a DR (disaster recovery) map of all installed apps — you only [...]

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Beta Release of Ubuntu 6.10 - codenamed “Edgy Eft”. Featuring the new init system, Readahead, is dealing with speeding up boot times, Betas of the lastest Firefox and Gaim, new photo software F-Spot, Tomboy on by default, and for compwiz fiends (like me) we can play [...]

“Email is addictive because it is a variable-interval reinforcement schedule. Checking email is a behavior that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not every time, the behavior produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link” i.e. rewards.
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While I’ve read this plenty of times, today via Digg I found complete docs that I wanted to save on how to restore a Ubuntu Linux install; bringing it back to the way you had it from a fresh install easily. Why would you need this? Well, hard drives die, but more often [...]

From the great Freakonomics.com, an article about an online database that’ll get you through the ‘phone trees’ or mazes anytime you have to call some company for customer service. “One solution to Phone Tree Hell is the beautifully named GetHuman database, which provides a nearly encyclopedic list of companies’ phone numbers and the string of [...]

Finding fonts that looked right in Mozilla on Linux used to be a pain, whereas today that seemingly little issue is far behind us. Now I want the fonts on my work machine running XP to look as nice. With a little help from Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner and this font combination, I’ve found [...]

“The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy. Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in [...]

Having the ability to do passwordless ssh logins helps in so many ways when automating tasks via scripts in Unix/Linux/BSD. Thankfully the great OpenSSH can take care of that for you, allowing you to do ssh, scp, sftp from and to multiple hosts. I always have to look up how to do [...]

Back a few months I installed Compwiz/Xgl, (developed by Novell) on Ubuntu. While it was still really new, I liked using it and was looking forward to seeing how it progressed. Well, it’s progressed quite well, and now I’ve found a simple (and easy to back) way to install and run Compwiz on [...]

Here’s something for me to try out on my trip to Vegas this weekend, could come in handy at those hotels. “The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you’re in a hurry or it’s a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While [...]

NASA has a page where you can find out when you can see the ISS and Shuttle Discovery as they orbit about 386 kilometers (240 miles) above. They will will be a steady white pinpoint of light moving slowly across the sky. Too fast for telescopes, but a good pair of field binoculars [...]