Getting to know systemd

Update 2014-08-20: apcid needs tweaking. See update section below. Somehow both my regular work laptop and home entertainment computers (both running Debian Jessie) were switched to systemd without me noticing.

New OpenPGP key

After playing around with How secure is my password, I dediced to start changing the handful of passwords I have committed to memory to being very long phrases rather than shorter, concentrated collections of random-seeming characters (another interesting blog post would be to understand the algorythm behind that site but for now I’ve just taken it at face value).

Administering CUPS from the command line

I usually try to avoid administering printers whenever possible. As a result I end of flailing around the CUPS web interface before I figure out how to re-enable a printer.

If you don't know what a quine is, consider yourself lucky

rhatto just asked me to approve a change in keygringer’s license from AGPLv3+ to GPLv3+ citing a discussion about a Berkeley DB’s switch to AGPLv3.

Sharing screen with remote Linux user behind a firewall

Intentionally helping someone poke a hole through their firewall to allow any users on a remote machine access to their computer is generally a bad idea… unless they want you to help them with their computer.

Creating virtual machines

I recently setup an Alix board from PC Engines. I installed Debian onto a Compact Flash card using grml for the first time.

Key Mapping for console redirection

This always flashes by too quickly for me to read…

Killing MySQL

MySQL is supposed to allow one + the max_connections from a super user so you can stop/restartmysql even when it is reporting too many connections.

Live video streaming using vp8enc and webm on Debian

The vp8 video codec and webm container format (which are alternates for theora/ogg and h264/flv) are getting lots of attention, especially as more web browsers are supporting html5 - which includes a new video tag that plays video directly in a web page, rather than requiring a plugin.

Managing KVM instances

At May First/People Link we have been using KVM for several years now and recently I have been running KVM instances on my local laptop.