I had a hell of a time the other day trying to find a reasonably up to date Debian Jessie virtual machine for testing on.

It doesn't take too long to install Debian, but its much nicer to just grab an OVA file, open with virtualbox and be ready to go.

I have only installed a very …

Recently, the Debian project announced that they intend to make more of their services available as Tor hidden services. They have added a new package to the repositories making it easy to use Tor hidden services when using apt to upgrade packages.Tor is software that allows better anonymity when …

There is fuller documentation of how to set up unattended upgrades on the debian wiki, but it is sometimes nice to have a super-compact cheatsheet for ones own reference. Others may have a use for it too.First thing to do is to install the necessary unattended-upgrades and apt-listchanges packag …

The Domain Name System (DNS) is like a phone book — you send a query to a server that says what is the number for charlieharvey.org.uk? and it sends back an IP address. Nowadays lots of people use either their ISP’s DNS server or one of the public DNS servers like Google’s 8.8.8 …

I am working my way through a book called Types and Programming Languages, by Benjamin C. Pierce at the moment. I’ve just started the chapter on lambda calculus and I thought it would be fun to be able to include the λ character in my notes. I realize that this sounds a little like displac …

Is there a nice way to split a multi-page PDF into its constituent pages? Its a question that comes up more often than you would think. Of course you could point some proprietary software at it, or you could do the job by hand. But there is a lovely free software way to do it, so you would be sor …

A quick bit of commandline-fu today. And a trick that I always spend ages having to search the web for. Its often the case that you want to find the exact serial number or model or chipset of your motherboard. There is a wonderful command called dmidecode which fetches the DMI data from your mach …

I have, of late, been learning Haskell following my experience of it in my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks adventure. Now, I normally learn stuff from books, but browsing through Hacker News a while back, I spotted Rein Henrichs’s new series of Haskell Live tutorials. I decided to follow along …

Update 2013-02-15 Since this article was written the PPA I list has got frozen at version 18 of chromium. If you want something newer and shinier, you should replace the sources.list line with deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/a-v-shkop/chromium/ubuntu lucid main and replace the apt-key command with sudo …

Back in 2008 me and my pal Penguin decided that it would be fun to have a webserver to play with. Nowadays, it doesn't cost much to have a virtual server with awesome hosts like Bytemark. But it still costs. Plus we wanted to provide a bit of a community activist resou …

This is a quick tute for folk who want to send email from the commandline under the various Unices, especially those who also need to include attachments. This has been tested on Debian GNU/Linux with Icedove/Thunderbird. We start by simply sending an email from the commandline. I shall use th …