Posted by Georg Sauthoff in misc
Getting along without touch typing is possible. But learning touch typing is usually a big productivity boost, reduces stress and may prevent typical keyboard induced health risks. This article describes some learning approaches and optimization opportunities.
The first thing to learn is to place the fingers in a …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in network
Lately, Google mail servers are getting more extravagant in what mail they accept. Setting up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) DNS record is a relatively low effort way to get mail though users of the Google mail service. (Those users aren't necessarily identifiable by the Gmail domain as it's also …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in misc
This article features a watch list of work related movies. A list for getting some peace of mind in the evening after working overtime.
Each movie has some relation to a pathological work related setting. Not always on the surface, but more on a deeper layer of interpretation.
Some of …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in unix
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in linux
This article illustrates how the virtual memory (VM) subsystem of the Linux kernel is able to cache files that are located on an NFS server.
In this small experiment we just need two Linux machines on a local network, where one …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in linux
Debian recently released a warning advisory regarding a hardware bug in the hyperthreading implementation on certain Skylake/Kaby Lake Intel CPUs. It can be mitigated by a microcode firmware update - at least on some models. This article is about checking a non-Debian system for this issue and verifying if the …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in android
A stock Android device is locked down, by default. Rooting
is the process of getting access to the root user (think: installing
su). This article lists several advantages of a rooted device.
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in linux
Grml is a Linux Live CD distribution geared towards system administration tasks and other console work. Unfortunately, its development has slowed down in the past years, i.e. the latest stable release is from 2014. In 2017, when dealing with modern hardware, modern features like Btrfs, SELinux etc. this is …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in misc
The firmware updates for the Samsung 840 EVO SSDs come as ISO images which isn't very helpful if your system doesn't have a CDROM drive. It turns out that the ISO images just contain DOS binaries, though. This article describes how to use a FreeDOS USB stick for flashing, instead …
Posted by Georg Sauthoff in linux
Traditionally, UNIX filesystems also maintain the access time (atime) of a file. This is very much an anti-feature because it yields a write operation for each read operation. Which is obviously bad for performance. Since Btrfs is a copy-on-write (COW) filesystem maintaining atimes is even more painful. Thus, a sensible …