Brute forcing is an essential part of hacking – it is the last resort, it offers hope and sometimes, it just works! Have you ever wanted to code a small script that would bruteforce email servers for you? It is imperative to remember that our brute forcing efforts are only as great as our password l…

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…

Unless you've been under a rock lately (which I'm guilty of some of the time, let's be honest) and you're into Linux gaming, you would have heard of a little something that the Valve Corporation has brought out in their Steam client - called 'Proton'. This bundle of goodness brings a whole host of…

Just recently released into Early Access on Steam, Paper Dungeons Crawler is the sequel to Paper Dungeons, a table-top styled turn-based RPG that also saw a Linux release, by indie team Agent Mega. This sequel takes a more pure 'Roguelike' adventure direction than its predecessor while retaining…

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…

Diablo II is usually a breeze to run on Linux, thanks to WINE and so often times you need no special tricks. However, if you're like me and experience a few glitches and washed out colours in the standard fullscreen mode, you have two options: run the game in windowed mode and go without…