Suspend your computer from a non-mainstream desktop environment
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
UPower for regular users
Major desktop environments usually provide a user-friendly menu to suspend your computer. Internally, if seems to use something called UPower, which uses something called PolicyKit, which in turn may or may not use another piece called ConsoleKit (do not ask me what all these pieces are and how they relate to each other, I do not know and I do not want to know). For the regular user, the result is the following: when they click on that button, it suspends their computer.
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One archiver to rule them all: bsdtar
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line
Sometimes, you have to use ZIP archives, or worse, RAR archives (curse them!), with one significant annoyance: zip, unzip, rar and unrar use a rather uncommon command line convention, compared to the usual tar, cpio and pax.
.diff or .patch?
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line
Silly question: when you use diff(1) to produce a file to be applied with patch(1), do you call the result a
diff or a patch? Do you name it foo.diff or foo.patch?
Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line
FAT
USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.
exFAT
Good news: someone addressed that problem. Bad new: that someone is Microsoft. So as you could expect, exFAT, the extended FAT, is a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.
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Do not reCAPTCHA!
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Miscellaneous, Grumble
You probably know reCAPTCHA already: for the webmasters and the end user, it is an antispam system which asks you to read distorted words in order to prove that you are a human and not a spamming bot. This service has another end: instead of generating its distorted texts, it takes them from printed books to help digitalizing them.