I’ve been meaning to write a quick post on PGP/OpenPGP related settings that you can use to increase your overall security even more. Simple things like changing your preferred cipher and digest algorithms. In fact I even started writing just such a post about a year and a half ago but never got around to finishing it. Luckily I was recently linked to the following website that deals with essentially everything I was going to write about anyway.

Recently I read an interesting article by Vint Cerf, mostly known as the man behind the TCP/IP protocol that underpins modern Internet communication, where he brought up a very scary problem with everything going digital. I’ll quote from the article (Cerf sees a problem: Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow – posted June 4, 2013) to explain: One of the computer scientists who turned on the Internet in 1983, Vinton Cerf, is concerned that much of the data created since then, and for years still to come, will be lost to time.

Here are some of my recent posts from over at The Linux Experiment. The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact The apps of KDE 4.10 Part III: KTorrent The apps of KDE 4.10 Part IV: Amarok The apps of KDE 4.10 Part V: Kopete The apps of KDE 4.10 Part VI: Calligra Suite The apps of KDE 4.10 Part VII: Dragon Player  

These days you really need a strong, unique password for almost everything you do online. To make matters even worse for the average user, security nuts will tell you that you actually need a different password for essentially every account you hold. Why? Consider the following scenario: Little Timmy signs up for Facebook using his super secret password @wesomeS@auce3!. This password is so strong and good that even he can hardly remember it.

Saw this somewhere and figured I would post it before I lost it. Here is a very easy and simply way to move a file in Java without using the new-ish nio APIs. File srcFile = new File(…some file to move…); File destFile = new File(…where to move the file…); srcFile.renameTo(destFile); That’s it. Pretty simple. In fact it is actually shorter than the nio way of doing things FileChannel in = new FileInputStream(source).

If you’re like me, and you probably are, you do a terrible job of backing up your digital files life on a regular basis. Thankfully some smart people out there have made it awfully convenient to set up a backup system once and then more or less forget about it. My personal tool for the job is Areca Backup – while it is not without its flaws I find it an easy to use, feature rich, and cross-platform (essentially anything that runs Java) backup solution.

Here are some of my recent posts from over at The Linux Experiment. Test driving the new Ubuntu (12.10) Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #1) Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #2) Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1 (Report #3) Big distributions, little RAM 5

Ever wanted your computer to be on when you need it but automatically put itself to sleep (suspended) when you don’t? Or maybe you just wanted to create a really elaborate alarm clock? I stumbled across this very useful command a while back but only recently created a script that I now run to control when my computer is suspended and when it is awake. #!/bin/sh t=`date –date “17:00” +%s` sudo /bin/true sudo rtcwake -u -t $t -m on & sleep 2 sudo pm-suspend This creates a variable, t above, with an assigned time and then runs the command rtcwake to tell the computer to automatically wake itself up at that time.

It is a pretty common practice to use the command dd to make backup images of drives and partitions. It’s as simple as the command: dd if=[input] of=[output] A while back I did just that and made a dd backup of not just a partition but of an entire hard drive. This was very simple (I just used if=/dev/sda instead of something like if=/dev/sda2). The problem came when I tried to mount this image.

I recently re-built an older PC from a laundry list of Frankenstein parts. However before installing anything to the hard drive I found I wanted to check it for physical errors and problems as I couldn’t remember why I wasn’t using this particular drive in any of my other systems. From an Ubuntu 12.04 live CD I used GParted to to delete the old partition on the drive. This let me start from a clean slate.