Tanguy Ortolo

Since some years, there has been a movement towards standardization: mobile devices are now using Micro-USB for data transfer and charging, and SD or Micro-SD for storage extension (except Apple of course).

One piece is lacking to this perfection, however; as far as I know, digital camera producers did realize that SD won for storage, but they do not seem to have acknowledged the Micro-USB standard yet.

Now, since manufacturers and resellers do not indicate the connector type, I have no way to be sure that this is still the case. So, dear lazyweb, do you know if, by chance, there exists a compact digital camera that would use SD cards and a Micro-USB connector for data transfer and integrated charging?

Unix rocks, or at least one of its design feature does: everything is a file.

Here is one funny use of that feature. I consider that programs that manipulate text should basically take it on their standard input, and write it to their standard output, while specifying the name of an input or output file should be an optional refinement.

Well, at least one program was designed the other way: when used to import a foreign key, ssh-keygen -i has no option to read it on its standard input. No problem, this can be worked around:

# ssh-keygen -if /dev/stdin
[paste the foreign key here]

Unfortunately, that does not work with every action of ssh-keygen since not all of them were written to be able to handle streams, which cannot be rewound.

Using a very customizable email user agent (namely, Mutt), I am able to use several signatures depending on almost whatever criterion I want. So I spent some time drawing several thematic ones in ASCII Art, sometimes taking inspiration on existing models, sometimes entirely by myself (in bold). Hoping that it may be useful, here are some of them:

Read more ASCII Art signatures

I have just bought a gamepad, the Saitek V.3 Cyborg Rumble Pad (also marketed as PS2700), mainly to play at SuperTuxKart under Debian GNU/Linux.

It works perfectly, except for one minor feature, and it can be used for playing and as an X11 input device.

Read more Using a gamepad under GNU/Linux

tar and cpio

tar(5) and cpio(5) are two competing archive formats, that provide almost identical features. Both are streamed formats, originally designed to be used on tapes. Their major practical difference is the style of their standard command line utilities:

• cpio(1) takes the list of files to archive on its standard input, allowing a very high control but requiring to use another utility such as find(1) to archive an entire tree;
• tar(1) usually takes the list of file to archive on its command line, and browses directories recursively be default.

Read more cpio > tar