Showing headlines posted by eldersnake

Today I'm looking at something a little different. Rarely (or ever?) do I take a look at static website generators on here, but mkws is a bit of a special case. mkws is a static site generator (SSG) created by Adrian Emil Grigore, written in nothing but the good old shell. No, not BASH, but sh. Well technically it includes a couple of minimal binaries, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Geolocating is the process of retrieving location-related information about a given IP address. And yes! It can be done using Python! So, let’s get right to it.

Python can be used to generate from simple to very complex graphs. In this segment, we’ll learn how to graph using python.

Typically, when we surf the web, we leave digital footprints everywhere in the form of our IP address. We allow ourselves to be tracked and monitored by everyone out there. This is because our typical browsers allow it. Tor, on the other hand, does not allow tracking. It is a specialized browser whose first priority is anonymity.

Malware, where aren’t thou found? Well, even our wonderful Ubuntu can be infected. So what can we do about it? Hope and pray we keep our system safe and better yet, audit our systems regularly for malwares and rootkits. There are 4 system auditors for Ubuntu that we will review - lynis, rkhunter, chkrootkit, and clamav.

Ever wanted to send emails using just Python? A few lines of code and you don’t even need to log into your Gmail account to email anyone in the world. In fact, you can do this in your terminal.

In SSH tunneling, an encrypted channel is created between an ssh client and an ssh server. Information flowing within the encrypted tunnel is secure and thus cannot be intercepted. This type of service is in particular used when running insecure protocols such as TightVNC. They can also be used to access internal networks and services running on them, bypass firewalls, as VPNs and as backdoors.

Until recently, I was content using the Uncomplicated Firewall that comes built-into Ubuntu. And it's called uncomplicated for a reason: its complicated counterpart – the iptables. It's not to say that iptables are difficult to comprehend or even impossible to use, but is rather massive. In other words, it has immense capacity and functionality, and as such is perhaps a lot more complicated.

To see the the online ABC news article in Liferea's browser corresponding to a headline, you have to double-click on the headline, or right-click on it and and choose "Open In Browser". This works because the article's URL is indeed included in the RSS file, although you can't see it.

To get that link into the descriptive text, I wrote a simple hack with AWK, described in detail below.

NBSPs are also useful in HTML documents, where they're coded as   and rendered as whitespace by a browser.

NBSPs, however, are fairly useless in text in a terminal. When NBSPs occur where they're not supposed to, they can give unexpected results in data and code processing.

There's always more than one way to do a job in the shell, and there may not be One Best Way to do that job, either. Nevertheless, different commands with the same output can differ in how long they take, how much memory they use and how hard they make the CPU work.

Out of curiosity I trialled 6 different ways to get the last 5 characters from each line of a text file, which is a simple text-processing task.

Do you translate blocks of text by copying them and pasting into Google Translate in a browser? If you do, the script explained here might save you a lot of work. The script relies on translate-shell, a wonderful command-line utility written by Mort Yao and available in the repositories of most distros.

Several of my data-auditing scripts take a long time to execute. Until recently I had no way of knowing how long they'd take. I'd enter the command for the script, press Enter and wait. And wait.

I've now discovered the pipeline viewer or pv command, which tracks the progress of my scripts.

Diablo II is usually a breeze to run on Linux, thanks to WINE and so often times you need no special tricks. However, if you're like me and experience a few glitches and washed out colours in the standard fullscreen mode, you have two options: run the game in windowed mode and go without cinematics, or install a GLIDE-OpenGL wrapper and get the game running properly in its fullscreen glory again, without the glitches and colour problems. I detail how to do that in this article.

Each of the two file managers I use — Thunar and Xfe — allows me to open a terminal in a selected directory. In Thunar, I right-click on a directory and choose Open Terminal Here, and in Xfe I use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + t. In both cases, though, the terminal window opens right on top of the file manager window. I prefer the "open terminal here" action to open a terminal in a different workspace and to take me to that workspace. This article explains how I organised that.

Microsoft has used two different starting points on the calendar for calculating dates in different versions of their Excel spreadsheet program. Really. One version used 1 January 1900 for serial day numbering, the other used 1 January 1904. Of course, up to date versions of Microsoft Excel can handle this difference in older files easily, just like up to date versions of Microsoft Windows are completely problem-free and totally, absolutely secure.

If you want to know the local time around the world, Linux has options ranging from plain to gorgeous.[..] What I wanted, though, was a time-notifier that showed me just the local time and day in a few selected places, that could be called up with a keyboard shortcut, that displayed the information in an eye-catching way in the corner of my screen and that disappeared automatically after, say, 5 seconds.

Eyeballing for fields without visible characters would be tedious, and calling a non-empty field an empty one would be an easy mistake to make. This article explains a script I wrote to automate the job of finding and recording empty fields in very big tables.

I have a script that compiles and sorts museum collection data. One of the data fields is for museum registration codes, and a plain sort doesn't understand that humans expect "KS.99", for example, to come before "KS.100". My script instead uses the magic "-V" option for GNU sort, and gets the human-friendly result.

A few years ago I acquired an HP Chromebook 11, which I talked about in an article on this site at that time. I talked about how I ran Linux software side-by-side with Chrome OS thanks to the likes of Crouton. Since then, the machine has had some basic use, and rather ironically, used as an offline machine, where I would use it for typing purposes mostly, being that the machine has a lovely keyboard and is very battery efficient. But I recently felt it was time to ditch Papa Google's influence on the machine and get rid of Chrome OS - enter Arch Linux ARM.