Long-term Memory

Facebook, Twitter and Google have the nasty habit of tracking your every move on the internet. This ABE-script prevents this:

# Allow Facebook scripts and objects to be included only
# from Facebook pages
Site .facebook.com .fbcdn.net .facebook.net
Accept from .facebook.com .fbcdn.net .facebook.net
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

# also stop google+ widget
Site plus.google.com
Accept from plus.google.com
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

# and twitter
Site platform.twitter.com
Accept from twitter.com
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

I’ve been re-searching for this page long enough to make a note this time.

http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html (local copy)

I had some difficulties creating a bootable USB stick on MacOSX. Most guides use hdiutil and dd to put the image on the stick, but this failed to boot on my linux machine…

This article was very helpful, and confirms what I was thinking. The main difference is that this method makes a MBR partition table, adds MBR boot code and puts the data onto the first partition (as opposed to putting the data straight onto the disk).

Continue reading ‘Making bootable USB sticks on MacOSX’ »

I found this blogpost by Kenneth Reitz, explaining that you don’t need the full Xcode anymore to just get GCC. Apple now officially provides “Command Line Tools for Xcode” as a free download with any AppleID. Which reduces the required download from 1.6GB to only 118MB!

I have a home server with a Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB disk in it. Recently, I’ve come across this post explaining that this drive’s IntelliPark parks the head after only 8 seconds of being idle. Linux by default caches disk access for 30 seconds on an idle system, leading to up to 120 load/unload cycles per hour!

Continue reading ‘Prolonging the life of a WD Green HDD’ »

I found myself firing up a calculator every time I needed to base-convert a number from/to hex or octal. So I wrote a very simple HTML-page that I added to my dashboard that does just this.

Continue reading ‘Base convertor’ »

Just found this wonderful site which matches your drawing to the corresponding Unicode character(s).

FreeBSD is, by default, still limited to usernames of less than 16 characters. Changing this to 32 or even 64 is not difficult, but does require some time to recompile the entire system.

Continue reading ‘FreeBSD with “long” usernames’ »

I often find myself changing routes on my OS X system. Usually, however, I’m systematically adding the same routes over and over again, because they were automatically removed after a reboot, network change or whatever. Enter LocationChanger.

Continue reading ‘Automatically doing things when you change network’ »

ZSH has some pretty nifty TAB-completion. But I found the git completion to be slow, especially on large repo’s. I wasn’t the only one. Some suggest to disable the context-aware completion completely, but I prefer Victor Quinn’s pointer to this solution which just upgrades the completion logic to the latest version.

Continue reading ‘ZSH git completion slow’ »