badblocks: test your mass storage!
Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros »
Automated cleanup of Docker leavings
As much as I like Docker, one thing it doesn't do well: cleanup whatever is left on my hard drive after running it for a while. »
Python requests SSL and InsecurePlatformWarning
Every now and then, when using Python 2.7 < 2.7.9 and trying to access SSL resources, especially through the requests toolkit, which seems »
chmod and the capital X
This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, »
Kill Me Softly: killing a process The Right Way
I was tired of repeating the same old pattern. Send a kill signal. Check with pgrep. Did the process exit? Send a kill -9. Now all »
Unfreezing your desktop: when Compiz goes wrong
A desktop freeze is something that's not so rare nowadays - that's not good, but we shouldn't get desperate about that. I like Compiz with Unity »
Don't give a shell to system users - use su
I seem very ancientwisdom-oriented these days. Sometimes you've got a system user on your linux server that's used to run a specific service; it's a good »
SSH hostnames configuration and shortcuts
This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@ »
I wish sudo would ask for my password less often
This is a very old trick, but I find many people doesn't know about it yet. If you're using sudo (and you definitely should), one minor »
Ubuntu: faster release upgrade
It might be high time to update to the latest Ubuntu 14.04. I think that the upgrade process that is provided by Canonical is slightly »