How to Generate UUIDs in Linux

UUIDs (or GUIDs as they're called in Windows parlance) are 128-bit codes that are used as unique identifiers for objects and resources. The acronym stands for Universally Unique IDentifier (or Globally Unique IDentifier in Windows). The purpose of UUIDs is to provide a system of identification where there is some assurance that the ID you're …

Lenovo: The Ultimate Hacker Brand

What makes Lenovo laptops ideal for running Linux? That's a question I found myself asking, and I figured it would make for an interesting research project. I've owned a Thinkpad for close to nine months now, but I still know relatively little about these amazing machines. So I figured I should take some time to …

How to Write a Daemon Process in C

I thought I'd do another C tutorial, since I haven't done anything on C programming in a while. In this tutorial I'd like to show you how you can write your own daemon processes, also sometimes known as servers. I'm not going to show you how to write a web server or anything like that, …

Shell Script to Download Photos Directly from Instagram

If there's one thing I absolutely fucking hate, it's modern web interfaces. It used to be that if you wanted to download an image from the Internet, all you had to do was right-click and then select "Save As" from the drop-down menu. Now all these photo upload websites have their own special interfaces that …

SSD Data Sanitation in Linux

Previously I talked about data sanitation on magnetic media (see my DoD tutorial). Now I want to explore the same topic, only with solid state drives. Data sanitation for SSDs is very different from data sanitation for HDDs - it is both easier and harder. Easier because there's no residual data left over - once …

How Linux Package Managers Work

Linux package managers are a very interesting mechanism. For one thing, the package manager is the main thing that distinguishes one family of Linux distros from another. Things like the desktop environment, the window manager, what programs are installed by default, etc. are all malleable and don't distinguish a distro beyond just it's initial configuration, …

My Bandwidth is Being Throttled (And I’m Going to Do Something About It)

I live in someone else's house. No, not my parents, someone else. Don't ask. Suffice to say, I'm extremely poor and can't afford my own apartment, so a group living situation is my only option at this point. Anyway, this house has WiFi, which is cool. For a while we didn't have WiFi and I …

How to Get the Dimensions of a Linux Terminal Window in C

Here I will be addressing a topic of interest to those of you who want to write full-screen applications for the Linux terminal. Yes, you could use a library like curses for this, but I'm going to go a bit deeper than that and show you how it all works under the hood. Or at …

My Step-by-Step Process for Starting Arch Linux Live

In this blog post I will detail the steps I go through to bring an Arch Linux live distro from a minimal boot disk to a fully functional text-mode Linux system. All changes get deleted when I shut down, but this is the system I'm working with until I get around to actually installing Arch …