A bit of History

I bought a new phone and I like it. I’m moving into the android market where previously, my only android experience has been from a underpowered Kindle Fire 2nd-Gen. Then just a few months ago, I nabbed a neat little LG Optimus Fuel to handle work related tasks like check emails and do normal tasks one does with a smart phone. It does ok if you keep things simple.

For years I’ve been happy with my trusty old java powered LG 500G with it’s hardware QWERTY keyboard and basic phone + text abilities with a few smart phone abilities like note taking and a basic web browser that’d crash if the page was too big, assuming it loaded in the first place. LOL.

Anyway, onto the Review!

If you’re like me, you’re probably running linux on a SSD and wish to reduce the amount of writes as much as possible to prolong the life of your SSD and if you regularly view image or video files in your file browser than this tip is for you.

My file browser, or nemo as it’s called, saves it’s thumbnails in ~/.cache/thumbnails. This folder can get quite big if you happen to browse folders full of images every day. Lucky for us, we have a built in ramdisk to store them in.

If you’re in the computer repair business then good valuable tools are nice to have around. Especially if you fit them all onto one little usb flash drive.

• CentOS x86_64 Minimal
• Clonezilla (Clone Hard Drives and SSDs)
• Dan’s Boot ’n Nuke (Wipe out them pesky bits on the hard drive. :) )
• FreeDOS
• Gparted Live (Standalone Partition Editor)
• Hiren’s Boot CD
• Kali Linux (For the “hacker” in you. :P)
• Linux Mint or your distribution of choice.
• Memtest86+
• NTpasswd (Reset windows passwords)
• Ophcrack (Cracking simple passwords. Your mileage may vary.)
• Puppy Linux (A small but simple Linux Distribution)
• System Rescue CD
• TinyCore (Another small Linux Distribution)
• VMware ESXI (Could come in handy)
• Windows Defender Offline

The tool I used to stuff all this onto a flash drive is called YUMI. So many tools can be crammed onto a 32GB flash drive and have spaced left over. I suppose more can be added but I also have 4 different versions of Kali Linux and Linux Mint 32bit and 64bit versions, 2 editions each.

Yup. Any user of Windows 10 might have noticed that despite being configured to sleep after a period of time, it either complies or ignores it. I have a system that even though it’s set to sleep after an hour, it for whatever the reason, continues to run throughout the night and maybe it’ll eventually go to sleep.

I don’t know if it has to do with an increased number of background processes or what but something has changed from the previous versions. Unless one dives into the settings to change the defaults, even a slight vibration of the table wakes the beast. It’ll also sleep at random as long as there’s nothing running that needs to stay up.

There are a few apps I would like to share that I find incredibly useful on a daily bases and while setting up a new pc. All programs are free unless otherwise specified. I like free apps and many will have a donate button if you so choose to do so.

• Ninite
• Atom
• Battery Bar
• Cygwin
• Foobar2000
• Notepad ++

I think we can all agree that backing up data is important for one’s most irreplaceable data, such as family photos or important documents and such. There can be big consequences to not doing it and data recovery for even just a few gigabytes can easily cost several thousand dollars. So, I’m going to suggest a few programs I like to use to make life a little easier.

I would like to talk a little bit about coding in the cloud. A few weeks ago I discovered the world of cloud IDEs and thought, “What a wonderful way to write.”. Of course, everything is not without it’s limits but it does the job.

The Eternal Battle

A little something I did for my pc I shall attempt to describe the process. On my computer, I have rigged up 3 4-pin molex connectors on the rear panel of my case that are wired to 3 switches mounted in a spare 5.25" bay. There is a 4th switch that is intended for internal lighting if I wanted at a future date. I presently have them wired to output 12v to both power pins on each connector. The switches draw their power from a spare PCIE power connector on the power supply, 2 12v wires to power 4 switches. Yes, this can be dangerous but as long as I connect only 12v devices, no worries.

So I’ve decided to start a new blog. Something simpler, easier to maintain. Maybe use it to document something. I don’t know. It’s powered by Octopress, as you can see in the footer. :) I’m hosting it on GitHub and editing on a cloud based IDE called, Cloud9.

It’s pretty cool. You get unlimited workspaces for all you development needs, 5 gigs of space, 1gb of ram, per workspace for free. Each workspace is based on Ubuntu and pretty much gives you a full system minus a few caveats. There’s no ssh access aside from the IDE’s connection to the server. There’s 3 public ports you can run services on to preview things.