This week’s techmail is Introducing Linux virtual containers with LXC. I played with LXC for the first time a little while ago when writing this tip, and it’s pretty slick. It’s not quite as feature-complete or as robust as OpenVZ, but it’s very close. It also has some benefits over OpenVZ, like direct integration with the upstream kernel. LXC is something to watch; it would be extremely cool to see things like Firefox stuffed into an LXC application container in the future, so it can really only ever mess with specific files/directories. LXC is definitely something to keep an eye on.
1Password for Mac OS X: One program to store them all
This week’s mac techmail was 1Password for Mac OS X: One program to store them all which is an introduction to the immensely useful 1Password program. If you have a mac and you don’t have 1Password, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. 1Password stores passwords (browsers, database, SSH logins, etc.), serial numbers, and notes in an encrypted keychain format. It has plugins for the mac browsers that let’s you autofill password information in sites meaning you have one place to store your passwords and they are accessible from all browsers (and you can add new login info from any browser). To make it even better, you can sync the 1Password keychain using Dropbox or whatever so the same keychain can be used on different systems.
This is probably the absolute best password management app I’ve ever laid eyes on. The companion iPhone/iPod Touch app is icing on the cake. Well worth checking out if you haven’t played with it before.
Use Live USB Creator to install Fedora 12 from a USB stick
This weeks’s techmail was Use Live USB Creator to install Fedora 12 from a USB stick which looks at using the Live USB Creator tool to build a bootable USB stick that can be used to run or install Fedora (or any other Live CD Linux distro). Very slick stuff. Worked great for me to get Fedora 12 installed on my MSI Wind (the old hackintosh that I thought was acting up due to me bungling something with OS X). Sadly, it appears the MSI Wind is truly hooped, as the same hanging issues I had on OS X I am also getting on Fedora 12. Swapping the harddrive made no difference, so I think the Wind is a paper weight. =(
iChat-like remote desktop sharing for Linux
Does anyone know of such a beast? Last night I had to drive to my mother’s place as she insisted there was a problem with her email and needed me to come check it out. Sadly, it was due to the Buzz stuff and if she actually read the page, she’d have seen the “skip the Buzz, take me to my inbox” link. Instead, I arrived to a half-dozen firefox windows open to the same Buzz introduction page.
In light of that, I know I can setup VNC or NX or whatever to get onto her computer. That’s fine, but I’d like something like iChat that does screen *sharing* so I can see what silly thing she’s doing and prevent me from getting in the car in the first place (not that I dislike visiting my mother, understand, but this is a fairly routine occurrence that would best be done by remote since I’m not so good at hiding the irritation in my face).
I’m not aware of anything that can do this… is there something out there that will do the trick? Right now she’s running Mandriva 2009.0, but I plan to upgrade that to Fedora 12 one of these days.
Learn and use regular expressions with Kodos
This week’s Linux techmail is Learn and use regular expressions with Kodos which is a slick little app written in python that lets you learn regular expressions and build them in a nice GUI interface. This is a great tool for testing regular expressions outside of your code. I’m no regexp guru, so tools like this are really handy for me.
Enhance Safari with Glims plug-in
This week’s mac techmail is Enhance Safari with Glims plug-in which discusses the free Glims plugin for Safari. This plugin adds a bunch of features that should have been in Safari to begin with as far as I’m concerned: automatic re-opening of tabs when you start Safari, auto-closing the download window… it also adds some extras for searching; with Glims you can customize your search box to build pre-defined queries of other sites or create shortcuts to sites, etc. I used to use Saft for this, but every time there is a new version of Safari, it seems like Saft trails a few days holding you back from upgrading (or losing the functionality it provides), and Saft isn’t free. Glims is free and provides almost all of the functionality that Saft does. Definitely a worth-while addon for the Safari browser.
