Here is a quick SSH tip that I only discovered a month or two ago despite years of using SSH on a daily basis. When SSH freezes, as can sometimes happen if the network connection drops, it is possible to kill the connection more elegantly than just by closing the terminal tab (my previous way of dea …

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 …

At newint we are working our way through our SSL/TLS certificates to make sure they are all signed with SHA2 algorithim, rather than SHA1, which is starting to show its age. We use Gandi as our certificate provider. As you can see, they have very recently started issuing SHA2 certificates if you …

A while back I upgraded Icedove/Thunderbird on some of my machines. Since then I have been able to add events to my calendar, but they have been disappearing on reload. It has been doing my nut in a bit, so I have written up the issue in case others hit the same problem.The problem …

There are a few approaches to blocking ads. Adblock Plus seems to have become the most popular. It uses Firefox’s content policies interface and you can read more about how Adblock plus works on the FAQ.I have been playing around this week with another approach to Ad blocking, which is do …

When I administer mail servers, I often use the aliases functionality to set up email groups and forwards. I find it very convenient to have everything in a single file. One thing that I don't like is keeping all the names in alphabetical order. While doing so might seeem like something from the …

Recent weeks have brought a pile of new comment spam on this site. I’ve explored a few ways of mitigating the amount of crap I receive, and hpoefully wasting some spammer bandwidth. This includes various lookups that are built into the code that runs the site, dodgy posts get timed out for a …

Today I needed to add a passphrase to an ssh key. The key had previously been used for automated batch processing work in cronjobs, and thus didn't have a passphrase set — a bit of a security no-no. A quick scan of the ssh-keygen manpage led me to the -p flag, which updates or creates a pas …

Vimdiff is an amazing tool to work with file differences and it particuarly suitable for use when examining differences between git revisions. There is a command built in to git that is called git-difftool. It allows you to use an external tool to look at your diffs this tip just shows how I like …

A super quick tip this. The other day I needded to find images bigger than a given width on the New Internationalist website. The quickest way I could think of to do this was to use find to locate all the files and combine that with ImageMagick’s identify command. And finally to pipe that t …

This is hosted on Gitorious now. I thought I would give gitorious a whirl anyhow, so you can find the latest version of feed2diasp over there.

I've just got myself set up on …