Passwords are stored as hashes and as such even if a hacker breaks into and steals a database, every password will be in the form of a hash, which is not reversible. Hashes may not be reversed, but they definitely can be brute forced! Hashes can be brute forced using packages on GitHub like the…

Until recently, I was content using the Uncomplicated Firewall that comes built-into Ubuntu. And it's called uncomplicated for a reason: its complicated counterpart – the iptables. It's not to say that iptables are difficult to comprehend or even impossible to use, but is rather massive. In other w…

Most of the RSS feeds in my Liferea RSS reader have external links in their brief, descriptive texts, like this one from The Guardian newspaper: News feeds from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia's national broadcaster, don't have links: To see the the online ABC news…

A non-breaking space (NBSP) is a special kind of whitespace. It's an invisible signal that tells a text-processing program to avoid replacing that space with a linefeed or carriage return. For example, if you wrote "2 kg" in LibreOffice Writer and didn't want the "2" to be at…

There's always more than one way to do a job in the shell, and there may not be One Best Way to do that job, either. Nevertheless, different commands with the same output can differ in how long they take, how much memory they use and how hard they make the CPU work. Out of curiosity I trialled 6…

Do you translate blocks of text by copying them and pasting into Google Translate in a browser? If you do, the script explained here might save you a lot of work. At the core The script relies on translate-shell, a wonderful command-line utility written by Mort Yao and available in the repositories…

Several of my data-auditing scripts take a long time to execute. Until recently I had no way of knowing how long they'd take. I'd enter the command for the script, press Enter and wait. And wait. I've now discovered the pipeline viewer or pv command, which tracks the progress of my scripts. An…

Back in March 2015 I blogged about a track-changes script that reports the edits made to a tab-separated data table. The script actually generates two reports: a plain text version and a fancy HTML version. A slightly improved version of that script is on my data-cleaning website here. The script…

If you're a gamer, you probably find your computer's default CPU scaling (usually the "balanced" or "powersave" setting) is more than sufficient the majority of the time, but just occasionally, a game will run at its best when the CPU is set to maximum frequency all the time,…

Each of the two file managers I use — Thunar and Xfe — allows me to open a terminal in a selected directory. In Thunar, I right-click on a directory and choose Open Terminal Here, and in Xfe I use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + t. In both cases, though, the terminal window opens right on top of the fil…