better (watchout) better (!pout) better (!cry) echo Why santa_claus < north_pole > town cat /etc/passwd > list ncheck list ncheck list grep naughty list > no_gift_list grep nice list > gift_list santa_claus < north_pole > town who | grep sleeping who | grep awake who | grep ‘bad || good’ for (goodness_sake) { be good… (read more)
(This is a Rant. If anyone is offended, well, tough. You don’t have to read this. Having said that, no on-topic comments will be removed from this article.) George Best: I’m sure some people are genuinely sorry he’s dead. I’m also sure that he was a decent footballer in his day, too, although that was… (read more)
The next big milestone release of Mozilla Firefox is here: version 1.5 was released yesterday. I’ve been using 1.5 since one of the earlier release candidates. The single most useful new feature since the 1.0.x series is the ability for the program to update itself: this applies to both the core program and to any… (read more)
As originally mentioned here, I finally got around to ordering a T-Shirt from Sparkes’ new venture: nerd.ws. During the most recent LUG Radio episode, which incidentally featured the famous MrBen as a special guest, Jono indicated that it would be good if we all did our bit to “keep Sparkes in pies” by buying stuff… (read more)
Compares a real-world viral epidemic with an online computer virus/worm outbreak
It has been busy again for a while. Stuff of note: After a long summer break, a new episode of LUG Radio is out: Series 3 Episode 1. Go get! Sparkes, the man who is No Longer A LUG Radio Man has started his own little enterprise: selling T-shirts (and sweatshirts, hoodies etc.) with amusingly… (read more)
It seems I have a new PC. Well, a new ‘box’, anyway. It’s a long story. Hence, here’s the short version: The Short Version My old box broke, I bought a new one. The Long Version Machine playing up, occasionally random crashes, tried new RAM, new PSU, etc. Nothing seemed to help; eventually the thing… (read more)
I’m curious to know a little about what length passphrase people use for GPG and SSH. If you’re happy to answer these questions, please leave a comment below: How many characters long (approximately) is your passphrase? How often do you type it correctly? For comparison, my passphrase is approximately 50 characters long and I type… (read more)
For the second year running, I went to LinuxWorld Expo at Olympia in London. This was quite fun: and fortunately I managed to meet a few more people this year. When I arrived, the first person I found was Matt Bloch from Bytemark Hosting (this is the company this and other sites I own are… (read more)
Hot on the heels of SSH goodness, here are some tips relating to the use of GPG. Almost everyone who uses SSH probably uses ssh-agent to manage their SSH passphrase. However, until Friday, I’d never done the same thing for GPG. You use your GPG passphrase for digitally signing email and decrypting messages, for using… (read more)
