a simple reminder

Two things today...first, a simple way to determine how much work you are causing your laptop harddrive:

 sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count

Apparently anything above 600000 means your drive is about to kick the bucket :(

I've always wanted an easy way to pop up a reminder message at some point in the future from the command line on a Linux system. I wonder why it took me so long to find the answer?

 echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY zenity --info --text='go home'" | at "5pm"

another vim trick

Just found this amazing tip which allows VIM to automatically open a GPG encrypted text file, edit it, and save it back to disk in encrypted form without writing the unencrypted data to a buffer. Thank you Wouter Hanegraaff!

The Internet from Afar

I recently attempted to fire up an instance of Firefox on a remote system that I was connected to through SSH (with X forwarding enabled). I remember doing this back in the day with no problems. However, Firefox apparently has a "feature" now that checks the DISPLAY settings and starts the process locally if you attempt to run it over the remote connection. This behavior seems to be counter-intuitive and unwanted. Someone somewhere decided to start treating users as idiots. Now for the fix:

 firefox -no-remote

Of course this option is not mentioned in the help menu...

Where have I been?

This is pretty cool...



create your own visited states map

A Challenge

I often wonder if the number of hopeful days balance out the number of hopeless days. Has anybody ever tried writing down how they feel each day and doing an analysis on it? The patterns one finds could prove very interesting. And why does hopeful only have one L?

Random Thought

It is interesting and disturbing how few quiet places there are in my world. The loss of power always seems to leave a ringing in my ear...

Partition Fun

I recently made the mistake of installing Linux on a single disk partition. As a result, my home directory and all of my settings were stored on this partition and I was long past due for an OS upgrade. Luckily, a utility called RESIZE2FS for resizing EXT2/3 filesystems exists. With this tool, I was able to shrink the root filesystem from its original 60GB size down to approximately 20GB:

resize2fs -p /dev/sda1 20G

At this point, I could manipulate the partition table, resizing the first partition to 20GB and creating a new partition which would serve as my /home folder in the unused space. As long as the first partition is large enough to encompass the root filesystem, this should not cause any problems.

Finally, I could create a new filesystem in the new partition and copy my home directory there:

mke2fs -J /dev/sda2

At this point, I can install a fresh OS, formatting the root filesystem and still preserve my user settings :)