Daniel Perelman
The problem# In a shell script, I wanted to use inotifywait's --monitor option to watch for changes to files, but I didn't care how many changes had been made, only whether or not changes had been made. I wanted to use --monitor as if more changes where made later, I still wanted to get notified...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I went to resume a screen session I knew I had running and it failed: $ screen -r There is no screen to be resumed. Since that somewhat frequently happens because the session is still attached, I checked for all of the sessions with -list and to my surprise found no sessions at all:...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I returned to my desktop to find an error message saying the screensaver was unable load, and it wouldn't show the password box to unlock the screen. When I logged in via SSH from a different device and reattached to a Screen session I had previously started from inside my X session,...
Gábor Dombay
In his book Unix: A History and a Memoir, Brian Kernighan recounts his favorite grep story from the early days of Unix. Someone at Bell Labs asked whether it was possible to find English words composed only of the letters formed by an upside-down calculator. The digits on a turned calculator...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# Discord releases new versions somewhat frequently. The standard way to update the Linux desktop application involves too many steps, and requires opening a browser to download the new package, so it's especially annoying if I don't have a browser open. The solution# Put the following...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I was working on a bugfix for a GUI application I use, but I didn't want my development to interfere with the instance I was actually running. The application stores state that I didn't want to be modified by the in-development code in a few different places (data, settings, cache)...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# The actual filename structure of my blog posts contains the publishing date while the actual publishing date used by Pelican is in the file in a line starting Date:. For example, this file is content/2025/1026-lint-blog-dates.md and contains the header line Date: 2025-10-26 02:00...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I've recently been writing more series of blog posts or otherwise linking between posts using {filename} links. And also I've been adjusting the scheduling of my future planned blog posts, which involves changing the filename as my naming scheme includes the publication date in the...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# When doing an incremental backup, any moved file on the source filesystem usually results in recopying the file to the destination filesystem. For a large file this can both be slow and possibly waste space if the destination keeps around deleted files (e.g. ZFS holding on to old...
antipaucity
You may have heard of the recently-discovered/-published TLStorm vulnerability that affects – at least – APC SmartUPS devices. One of the prime issues highlighted is the embedded nanoSSL library that APC has used on these systems. If you want to find out if your system is affected, the...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I've been playing Codenames online a lot lately (using my fork of codenames.plus), and a friend suggested it might be fun to have themed word lists. Specifically, they suggested Star Trek as a theme as it's a fandom that's fairly widely known. They left it up to me to figure out what...