It is easy to setup a simple chat over Tor using the socat utility. To receive incoming messages you first need to setup a Tor hidden service. Add this to the end of your /etc/tor/torrc file:
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden-chat/ HiddenServicePort 2330 127.0.0.1:2330 After restarting Tor check the /var/lib/tor/hidden-chat/hostname file for your hidden service .onion address.
Use socat to setup a listener on port 2330, now incoming connections to ADDRESS.onion:2330 will show up on your terminal.
I have been using BackupPC to automatically back up the systems on my LAN for years now. It started out with a 3x250GB RAID5 as the storage pool and when I ran out of space on that I added another disk to bring it up to about 700GB. BackupPC does an excellent job of pooling common files together so that they don’t take up extra space. This is especially useful if you are backing up system files on multiple systems running the same OS release.
I use mutt as my email client. Something that has recently been bugging me is that when reading a message it displays the original Date: header with the sender's timezone. Since I work with people in several different zones I am constantly having to do timezone math when looking at these. So I decided to fix that with a bit of python.
One of mutt's features is that you can feed every email you view through a filter by using the display_filter setting.
A few weeks back my ancient Compaq laptop stopped booting (two LOUD beeps, no display, no drive noises). This system has been used in the garage to act as a serial to WiFi bridge for my AIS receiver, and to log temperatures for the garage and freezer temps you see at digitemp.com. The AIS data feeds the Live AIS view of Puget Sound.
The laptop was exiled to the garage after its power connector broke for the 3rd time and I had to hard-wire it by soldering it directly to the motherboard.
Failed hard drives are inevitable. Especially when the drive in question was manufactured on November 27, 2001. You know the time has come to replace it when your log files start filling up with errors like this:
Oct 28 03:53:05 cat kernel: res 51/40:00:fc:33:4e/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error) Oct 29 16:06:46 cat smartd[24427]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW! Failure is inescapable. Everything fails eventually, computers, people, electronics.
I have a few books I've bought for reading using the Kindle app on my iPhone. I'd like to be able to read them on my Fedora Linux based MacBook as well, but Amazon hasn't released a version for Linux yet, which is ironic given that the Kindle's OS is Linux based. All is not lost, there is an excellent project called Wine that enables you to run many Windows applications on your Linux system.
No, not on the lam. On the LAN. I have a fairly large collection of music. Years ago I used iTunes to rip the CD's to AAC format. Recently I've been using Amazon.com for more of my downloads so I have converted the library to high quality VBR mp3 files instead. I like being able to play the music no matter which system I am using, and the iTunes sharing works well for that.
Ever since I switched from Dish Network to a Roku player a few months ago I have had a couple of things I wanted my player to be able to do. The ability to categorize my Netflix queue is at the top of my list and it would be very cool to be able to play video from a local server. The SDK won't help me modify the Netflix application, but streaming from a local source is actually not a huge problem.
A few (ahum) years ago I wrote an article for Linux Journal on building a RAID system. While that exact system no longer exists, I do still have a RAID5 setup that I use with BackupPC to backup all the systems on my LAN. As I wrote about in my KVM article, I have updated my main Linux box to Fedora11. It had been out of backup rotation for about a year, since I have mostly been using my Mac Mini and everything on the Linux box was checked out of a remote Subversion repository.
I've been a VMWare Workstation user for years and have generally been pretty happy with it; but it is significantly slower than bare metal, especially when it comes to disk i/o. One of my responsibilities for work is creating and maintaining a custom Fedora distribution. This requires building new rpm packages and then creating a livecd iso for the install of the system. Lots of disk i/o involved in reading and creating the disk image meant that I was running Fedora9 as my native desktop.