This repository contains scripts to set up my configuration, tools and environment on all of my computers. The scope is limited to tools and configuration specific to my user account; I maintain separate provisioning for fixed-purpose computers.

With it, I can be productive within 10 minutes of encountering a new or re-installed PC.

[Callan] built a script which runs on every new server he spins up which selects two random colors, checks that they contrast well with each other, don’t create problems for the colorblind, and then applies them to the bash prompt.

Make yourself a temporary alias for the SD card, test it, then use that so you can’t accidentally get the wrong device. e.g.

MY_SD=/dev/sdc1
ls $MY_SD
dd if=disk.img of=$MY_SD

In this example “ls” is not really a good test, but I’m on Mac so I’m not sure if “diskutil info $MY_SD” would work for you, but sub in any command that you feel gives the confidence that MY_SD points in the right direction. //

If you´re always using the same removable medium, it´s easy to set an udev rule that match this particular device and symlinks (or even rename) it to /dev/whatyouwant

Or even more globally match any USB attached mass storage, for example /dev/sdxn becomes /dev/extUSBxn if you want to.

ATLANTA—A CFM Leap-1B engine made out of Lego bricks is making its worldwide public debut on April 18 at Lufthansa Technik’s booth (#1421) at MRO Americas.

The engine, built at 60% of the powerplant's actual size, is made of some 400,000 Lego pieces and weighs 450 kg (992 lb.). It measures 105.6 cm by 1.88 cm by 145 cm.

The idea came from a Lufthansa Technik employee who likes to build things out of Lego and his son, “who built the first Lego engines at a smaller scale for giveaways,” says Derrick Siebert, Lufthansa Technik’s VP of commercial engine services. “These were very well received from customers, and that is where the idea generated,” he adds.

sed, a stream editor

To override a non-builtin with a function, use command. For example:

ls() { command ls -l; }

which is the equivalent of alias ls='ls -l'.

command works with builtins as well. So, your cd could also be written as:

 cd() { echo before; command cd "$1"; echo after; }

To bypass a function or an alias and run the original command or builtin, you can put a \ at the beginning:

\ls # bypasses the function and executes /bin/ls directly

Calibre is brilliant, but many of its features fly under the radar. Here are the best Calibre features to help you manage your ebook collection.

A New Mexico School Boards Association instructor sees no role for parents in guiding their children’s public school education.

On Tuesday, the parental rights group “Freedom Families United” published audio tape of a New Mexican school board administrator speaking to members of local school boards.

“Parents do not have a fundamental right to tell you how public school teaches their child,” New Mexico School Boards Association Trainer Andrew Sanchez said in December. “Parental rights end when you decide to send your kids to public school. What you teach this generation that will soon be voting are going to be instrumental to the future of us as a democracy and as society goes forward.” //

“If you [school boards] engage in a policy which you’re going to actually create parental rights where none should or don’t exist,” Sanchez said, “or you’re [school boards] going to create opt-out policies so that people [parents] can opt out of certain ideas in the curriculum, there will be nothing to teach the kids.”

Sanchez suggested parents uncomfortable with the level of leftist activism inside their students’ classrooms ought to enroll their students in online schools or charter schools if not home school.

“Public schools, the right to a public education is a state right,” Sanchez said. “It is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution.”

Our cold galvanizing paint was the original ZRC product, and is still the industry standard. It is equivalent in function yet superior in convenience to hot-dip galvanizing. Brush-on applications will create a better interface between the product and the protected surface than a spray-on application will. To understand why, it’s important to learn a little more about zinc. Essentially, brushing smashes the zinc onto the surface and creates better contact between the zinc and the metal structure.

Our experts recommend the brush-on applications when you’re undergoing a high-volume project, like steel girder I beams. If you have a big job ahead, we recommend liquid paint. This is because you will get more coverage from a gallon of cold galvanizing paint than a spray can.

Remember, proper protection depends on accurate application. When brushing, be sure to cover the intended surface evenly. You will need to apply two coats in order to replicate the performance of hot-dip galvanizing.

Simple & Free Wiki Software

BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.

BookStack is fully free and open, MIT licensed. The source is available on GitHub.

Easy, Simple Interface
Simplicity has been the top priority when building BookStack. The page editor has a simple WYSIWYG interface and all content is broken into three simple real world groups:

• Books
• Chapters
• Pages

BookStack is built using PHP, on top of the Laravel framework and it uses MySQL to store data. Performance has been kept in mind and BookStack can run happily on a $5 Digital Ocean VPS.

Built-In diagrams.net
The page editor within BookStack has diagrams.net drawing capability built-in, allowing the quick and easy creation of diagrams within your documentation.

Optional Markdown Editor
If you prefer to write in Markdown then BookStack supports you. A markdown editor is provided and includes a live-preview as you write your documentation.

Integrated Authentication
As well as the default email/password login social providers such as GitHub, Google, Slack, AzureAD and more can be used. Okta, SAML2 and LDAP options are available for enterprise environments.

rm typically does not delete the targets of symlinks, but to say that it "does not follow symlinks" is not quite accurate, at least on my system (GNU coreutils 8.25). And deleting files is a place where accuracy is pretty important! Let's take a look at how it behaves in a few situations.

If your symlink is to a file, rather than to a directory, there is no plausible way to accidentally delete the target using rm. You would have to do something very explicit like rm "$(readlink file)".

Symlinks to directories, however, get a bit dicey, as you saw when you accidentally deleted one.

These are all safe:

• rm test2 (deletes the symlink only)
• rm -r test2 (deletes the symlink only)
• rm -rf test2 (deletes the symlink only)
• rm test2/ (rm: cannot remove 'test2/': Is a directory -- no action taken)
• rm -rf *2 (or any other glob matching the symlink -- deletes the symlink only)

These are not safe:

• rm -r test2/ (rm: cannot remove 'test2/': Not a directory -- but deletes the contents of the test1 directory)
• rm -rf test2/ (deletes the contents of the directory, leaves the symlink, no error)
• rm -rf test2/* (deletes the contents of the directory, leaves the symlink, no error)

The last unsafe case is probably obvious behavior, at least to someone well-acquainted with the shell, but the two before it are quite a bit more subtle and dangerous, especially since tab-completing the name of test2 will drop the trailing slash in for you!

It's interesting to note that test has similar behavior, considering a symlink to a directory with a trailing slash to be not a symlink but a directory, while a symlink without a trailing slash is both:

Dial Liberia - Cell phone card - low rates for calling from United States to Liberia - Cell

Over the decades, Barefoot College has attracted international and local funding to expand. The college now has water programs around India, and the Indian government brings in women from Africa and elsewhere to study solar engineering at Barefoot College for six-month courses, and they then return home to bring electricity to their villages. Here, “empowerment” is not a buzzword but a way of life.

“The illiterates of the 21st century,” Roy said, “are not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and relearn.”

The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you’re a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

While the Pulitzer Prizes have always been little more than self-dealing masquerading as journalistic beauty pageant, it was a lot easier to believe in this manufactured prestige back when journalism was at least slightly more competent and concerned with the appearance of objectivity. In fact, a spin through the last five years of Pulitzer recipients reveals some interesting choices that add up to a clear pattern. //

Every one of these major stories was badly handled by the media writ large, served activist political narratives, frequently involved credulously regurgitating actual misinformation, or some combination thereof. While there is always reason to be suspicious of Pulitzers, historically most of the objections to the awards handed out never rose beyond the level of newsroom gossip. //

While plenty of criticisms could be leveled at Trump for his statements about the 2020 election, the reporting on that phone call led to a media feeding frenzy that caused the unfair dismissal of very real and legitimate problems Georgia had with its elections.

More importantly, it bears mentioning the same Post reporter, Amy Gardner, who wrote the Pulitzer-cited story above, would file a follow-up story on Jan. 9 about yet another Trump conversation with the Georgia secretary of state. This time Trump told allegedly Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the fraud,” which was generally understood to mean that Trump was telling Raffensperger to abuse his power and make up reasons to disenfranchise people.

Not only did the Post have to run a correction on that story three months later — you can read the pretty astounding details here — when the dust settled, Gardner and The Washington Post conceded that they had “anonymously printed fabricated quotes they knew were from a second-hand source in the office of a political enemy, couldn’t confirm the quotes with additional sourcing, still attributed them to the sitting president of the United States, used those quotes as a basis to speculate the president committed a crime, and the Democratic party would later repeatedly cite the bogus article when attempting to impeach Trump for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’”

So the Washington Post reported complete misinformation that was cited as criminal evidence in the impeachment trial of Trump that resulted from Jan. 6, and still won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the event. Unsurprisingly, this story was also not included in the bundle of stories the Post sent to the Pulitzer committee. //

It seems that on every big news story, you now have a choice to make: Who are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the Pulitzer committee?

Kahle in a statement denounced the publishers' demands. "Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased," he said.

"Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.

"The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed. This is horrendous. Let me say it again – the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed. //

"And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do." //

During the hearing, Judge Koeltl probed the arguments made by McNamara and IA's attorney, Joseph Gratz. He raised the defendant's point that there's no evidence of financial harm because there's no evidence the defendants would have paid to license electronic versions of their physical books.

McNamara responded that the harm is real. The ebook market is real and IA is just refusing to participate, she argued.

Gratz maintains that libraries have a right to lend a physical book they have purchased and that they have a right under the fair use exception to copyright law to facilitate digital lending so long as it's one copy per book.

Amazon is an amazing technical company, but they lack in some ways. Technological prowess, culture, and/or business decisions will hamper them from capturing the next wave of cloud computing like they have the last two. This report will cover these 3 phases of cloud computing and how Amazon’s continued dominance in the first two phases doesn’t necessarily give them a head start in the battle for the future of computing. //

As Amazon ballooned in size with its retail business, it began to run into limitations of its monolithic 90s-era software practices. Metcalfe’s law sort of applied; as each additional service or developer was added, complexity grew at an n^2 rate. Even simple changes or enhancements impacted many downstream applications and use cases, requiring huge amounts of communication. As such, Amazon would have to freeze most code changes at a certain point in the year so the holiday season could focus on bug fixes and stability.

NASA’s plan to spend up to $1 billion on a tug to deorbit the International Space Station is a missed opportunity to instead repurpose or recycle the station, some in industry argue.

NASA announced plans as part of its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal this month to develop the tug to help deorbit the station at the end of its life in 2030. NASA is seeking $180 million in 2024 to start work on the tug, and anticipates spending as much as $1 billion to build it.

The agency had made clear that it and the other partners would deorbit the station at the end of its life, ensuring that debris that survives reentry falls in an uninhabited region of the South Pacific Ocean to avoid the risk of damage or casualties. NASA previously expected that it would use multiple Progress cargo spacecraft to handle the deorbiting, but said at a March 13 event about the budget proposal it chose to develop the tug to provide redundancy in those plans.

Ten years ago, the cloud was mostly used by small startups that didn’t have the resources to build and operate a physical infrastructure and for businesses that wanted to move their collaboration services to a managed infrastructure. Public cloud services (and cheap capital in a low interest-rate economy) meant such customers could serve a growing number of users relatively inexpensively. This environment enabled cloud-native startups such as Uber and Airbnb to scale and thrive.

Over the next decade, companies flocked en masse to the cloud because it lowered costs and expedited innovation. This was truly a paradigm shift and company after company announced “cloud-first” strategies and moved infrastructures wholesale to cloud service providers.

However, cloud-first strategies may be hitting the limits of their efficacy, and in many cases, ROIs are diminishing, triggering a major cloud backlash. Ubiquitous cloud adoption has given rise to new challenges, namely out-of-control costs, deepening complexity and restrictive vendor lock-in. We call this cloud sprawl.