Older blog entries for hacker (starting at number 427)

Quick tip for Users Hosting TurnKey Linux Images for Public Consumption

I host lots of internal infrastructure for friends, colleagues, the Open Source community, my LUG and others and much of the recent need I’ve seen has been with easy-to-contain images like those provided by the TurnKey Linux project. These are very small, light, lean VMs and app containers you can deploy on your servers, baremetal, […]

Syndicated 2014-12-26 03:48:02 from random neuron misfires

HOWTO: Quick 7-Zip Trick to Encrypt Your Files with Non-Interactive Mode

I have a lot of data that I archive away on a regular basis, both on my “PC” machines and my mobile devices OTA. I needed a secure, reproducible way to secure those data with a very strong, complex password using extremely tight compression. Unfortunately, p7zip on Linux and 7-Zip for Windows don’t permit a […]

Syndicated 2014-12-13 20:59:55 from random neuron misfires

Disable Login User List in Ubuntu 14.04, Trusty Tahr

The latest and greatest Ubuntu 14.04 is out, with a mountain of new features: “Ubuntu Linux version 14.04 LTS (code named “Trusty Tahr”) has been released and available for download. This updated version includes the Linux kernel v3.13.0-24.46, Python 3.4, Xen 4.4, Libreoffice 4.2.3, MySQL 5.6/MariaDB 5.5, Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, improvements to AppArmor allow […]

Syndicated 2014-04-25 00:30:29 from random neuron misfires

Disable Login User List in Ubuntu 14.04, Trusty Tahr

The latest and greatest Ubuntu 14.04 is out, with a mountain of new features: “Ubuntu Linux version 14.04 LTS (code named “Trusty Tahr”) has been released and available for download. This updated version includes the Linux kernel v3.13.0-24.46, Python 3.4, Xen 4.4, Libreoffice 4.2.3, MySQL 5.6/MariaDB 5.5, Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, improvements to AppArmor allow […]

Syndicated 2014-04-21 05:59:16 from random neuron misfires

Updating Legacy Fedora Linux Distributions to Use Archive Repositories

I run a VMware ESXi server here that hosts ~500 separate VMs, clones, templates and test builds of operating systems for testing, development, personal playground and other roles. Some of these VMs are older Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and various other Linux distributions. Since those distributions are no longer active, maintained by the community, the update […]

Syndicated 2013-11-24 20:43:33 from random neuron misfires

SOLVED: Fixing Perl Plug-ins for XChat Azure in OS X Mavericks 10.9

I’m a heavy user of IRC and have been since the late 90′s. I use X-Chat for IRC on almost all machines, including Mac and Windows, not just the Linux environment that it was created upon. When I recently upgraded my OS X Lion (10.7.5) machine to OS X Mavericks (10.9), I started seeing a […]

Syndicated 2013-11-05 21:50:37 from random neuron misfires

How Many Java Versions is Enough for Mavericks, Apple?

A lot of software outright fails to work on Apple OS X Mavericks. It’s a disaster. Almost nothing works right. Not only is the entire OS noticeably slower, by several orders of magnitude over the previous Lion (10.7.5) was running until a few days ago on my 11″ MacBook Air, but there are dozens and […]

Syndicated 2013-10-27 15:11:19 from random neuron misfires

SOLVED: Remove annoying duplicate users in your WordPress blog

This happens quite a bit, and I’m surprised the default WordPress install doesn’t have this fixed, but here’s a fix for cleaning up the duplicate users that will end up in your _users table in WordPress. In my multi-site installation, that table is called ‘wpmu_users’. If you didn’t change the defaults for your site, it’s […]

Syndicated 2013-10-11 01:14:57 from random neuron misfires

SOLVED: Transparent icons on XFCE desktop

Another quick and dirty XFCE desktop hack, this one to add transparent icon backgrounds to your desktop icons. If you’re tired of looking at ugly icon label backgrounds, and really want transparent backgrounds, the fix is simple! Here’s the code: style "xfdesktop-icon-view" { ## opacity of text background (0 - 255, 0 = transparent) XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha […]

Syndicated 2013-09-23 22:02:17 from random neuron misfires

HOWTO: Fix the broken “Open Terminal Here” menu icon in XFCE

If you’re using XFCE, specifically version 4, you’ve probably seen this issue come up a few times. It looks like this: The fix is pretty simple and straightforward. Here’s how: Go up to your “Applications Menu” and choose “File Manager”. This will launch your configured, default file manager (most-likely Thunar, unless you’ve changed something). Choose […]

Syndicated 2013-09-23 21:37:31 from random neuron misfires