Geek Stuff category archive

Lost in a lost world.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.

It’s not hard; it’s just different.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, May 7.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

. . . even as they eagerly sign up for the “Surveillance Society.”

Last month, news outlets reported that John Hancock was the first insurance company to offer discounts to policyholders willing to wear a Fitbit, and presumably let the company track their activity.

And, in related news.

I have a couple of new podcasts up at Hackerpublicradio.org, and you can too.

One is about Mutt, a command line email client which manages email the way email was meant to be managed; the other is about vim, a powerful and versatile text editor, but one with an extremely cryptic command set which many, including me, have found intimidating.

Facebook says, “Privacy, schmivacy. I’m going to take my electrons and go home.“

Yesterday, I noticed that the root partition of my Dell 1545n laptop was 97% full. This was not good. I was close to reaching the point that stuff would not work because the partition was full.

When I installed Slackware on that machine, I established three partitions: root, home, and swap. I gave root 20 GB, but, over the several years since I first put Slackware on this box, I’ve installed lots of stuff, and space was running out. Root needed more space.

I first tried resizing the partitions with GParted, but that failed; it seems the root was on a primary partition and /home (where everything else lived) was on an extended partition. I first set that configuration up so long ago that I don’t remember making those choices, but I must have.

Since resizing was not an option, I knew I had to reformat and reinstall. Consequently, I rsync’d my home partition to my Zareason file server to back up everything in /home, including all my configuration and data files.

I repartitioned and installed Slackware 14.1 (the box started with Slackware 13.37), giving root one-third more disk space (30 GB rather than 20 GB), then updated it to Slackware –Current.

Six hours later, everything important was reinstalled, reconfigured, and working, including my mutt email configuration, and all the dust-bunnies from four or so years of usage had been cleared out. Much of today was spent making this happen.

My first adventure with Linux was installing Slackware 10.0 ten years ago. I’m now running Slackware Current on two boxes (and Mageia and Mint on other machines), because Slackware is the distro of iron: it always works and never breaks. (Ten or fifteen years ago, who would have imagined having more than one computer in the house?)

Ten years ago, I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow managed to self-host my website on a Slackware box in my guest room. It took me from April to August in 2005 to bring it live. Now I can muddle through a reinstall and restore in less than a day.

I think I’ve learned something, and I’ve sure had a lot of fun along the way.

A Colorado man who has been “fighting with his computer for the last several months” unloaded a volley of shots into his Dell tormentor, resulting in the death of the computer and his arrest for discharging a firearm, cops report.

According to the Colorado Springs Police Department, officers responding last night to a 911 call about shots fired discovered that a “fed up” Lucas Hinch took his computer into a back alley and “fired 8 shots into the computer with a handgun, effectively disabling it.”

(snip)

The late Dell XPS 410 model . . . is survived by a monitor and a keyboard.

Natch, it was running Windows. The reference to the BSOD is dead giveaway.

Linux doesn’t get the BSOD, though there is a BSOD screensaver.

(Linux gets “kernel panics,” but I’ve seen that only once, nine years or so ago.)

Heh.

Police departments in midcoast and northern Maine said they have paid ransom to hackers to keep their computer files from being destroyed, WCSH-TV reported Friday night.

The Portland station said the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office and four towns paid $300 to the hackers after a virus, called a “megacode,” was downloaded on a computer system they share. Lincoln County Sheriff Todd Bracket said that the computer system was unusable until the fee was paid, and that the hackers claimed the program, called “ransomware,” would wipe the entire computer system clean if the fee wasn’t paid.

They paid the ransom in bitcoins.

Via Raw Story, Newsweek discovers that Facebook drops persistent cookies that track you even when you are not browsing Facebook.

This is not news. This is olds.

This is why, for years, the few times I visit Facebook, I do so only in a private browser tab that deletes all cookies when it’s closed, and, to be doubly safe, have my browser delete all cookies upon exit.

I recently purchased a new desktop computer to replace my Dell Dimension 4700, which I purchased at Second Source, the only outfit I ever trusted to repair an out-of-warranty laptop, oh, seven or eight years ago.

I purchased it from Zareason because they let you pick the distro of your choice. Natch, I picked Slackware, the distro that doesn’t hold your hand, the distro of iron, the distro that always works and never breaks.

I have spent the last few days configuring it to my liking. Today, I expect to get Mutt working.

There was one problem: the optical drive did not work; the tray would not even open. (I have an old Memorex external that I have used for years; it worked fine with the Zareason, so I was able to access optical disks, so the thing was workable.)

I called Zareason, where a real live human being whose menu options have not recently changed answers the telly phone. In a few days, I received a new optical drive in the mail; I swapped it in yesterday morning and it works like a charm.

This is the third Zareason device I’ve purchased. If you want a box with the Linux distro of your choice, I recommend Zareason wholeheartedly. They build good boxes, and they stand behind them.

I started my career working in a complaint department. I learned to judge a business not on whether something never goes wrong–that is an impossible standard–but on how it responds when something goes wrong, because something can always go wrong. Zareason passes the test, and passes it big time.

Oh, the Dell? I gave it to a fellow TWUUG member. May he have as much fun with it as I did.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.

It’s not hard; it’s just different.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, April 2.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Neil de Grasse Tyson discusses science, epistomology, and “arguing from ignorance.”

Via Raw Story.

The geeks were biting that day, and the anglers reeled in a big haul. (Details at the link.)

The administrators of a top deep-web marketplace have disappeared with over $12m worth of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, it emerged last night, in what appears to have been an “exit scam”.

Bit-coin is little more than three-card monte with added electrons.

What might have caused this?

Hint: The answer involves two computers. (Answer below the fold.)

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