After living the Ubuntu / Fedora / Windows life for the last few years, I finally decided to buy a new personal laptop and install Gentoo on it.
I ended up picking up a Lenovo IdeaPad 730S 13″. The hardware looks awesome, especially considering the price point. Some mild light bleed, but oh well.
Gentoo Linux runs great on it! It’s been a while since I used Gentoo and some things have changed, but a lot of things have stayed the same and I didn’t encounter any hard blockers.
I am planning to write a guide documenting my experience soon. Stay tuned!
So, it was pointed out to me that Firefox 25+ has a new, re-designed findbar that breaks my Clear Fields extension – naturally (thanks Luís). I guess I should be happy though, since this is the first incompatibility since Firefox 4 🙂
Support for this new findbar was a bit tricky, but in the end it works again. Version 4.1.0 contains the fix and should be available through Mozilla as soon as it clears their review process.
You can also download the new version by clicking the link below.
Passwords. No one likes them, but everybody needs them. If you are concerned about your online safety, you probably have unique passwords for your critical accounts and some common pattern for all the almost-useless accounts you create when browsing the web.
At first I used to save my passwords in a gpg encrypted file. Over time however, I began using Firefox’s and Chrome’s password managers, mostly because of their awesome synching capabilities and form auto-filling.
Unfortunately, convenience comes at a price. I ended up relying on the password managers a bit too much, using my password pattern all over the place.
Then it hit me: I had strayed too much. Although my main accounts were relatively safe (strong passwords, two factor authentication), I had way too many weak passwords, synced on way too many devices, over syncing protocols of questionable security.
Looking for a better solution, I stumbled upon LastPass. Although LastPass uses an interesting security model, with passwords encrypted locally and a password generator that helps you maintain strong passwords for all your accounts, I didn’t like depending on an external service for something so critical. Its ui also left something to be desired.
A Unix command line tool that takes advantage of commonly used tools like gnupg and git to provide safe storage for your passwords and other critical information.
UPDATE: there was a bug in 4.0.0 (of course) because I changed some function names just before releasing it.
Nothing too serious, you just couldn’t disable the in-field clear buttons :p
Thankfully I found it before it got approved in addons.mozilla.org,
but if you downloaded the extension from this blog, you may want to download again and update 🙂
UPDATE 2: The mozilla reviewers asked me to remove the popup greeting dialog,
so I replaced it with a web page that loads in a new tab. This resulted in version 4.0.2. Current 4.0.x users don’t need to update.
Original post:
I finally found some time and updated my Clear Fields firefox extension to version 4.0.2.
Included in this version you’ll find:
– Support for Firefox 4.0 (yay!)
– New in-field clear buttons for the Address, Search and Find fields.
You can disable them from the Tools menu if you don’t like them.
If you have any issues with the extension please let me now in the comments or at wired@linuxized.com. Make sure you include a list of other extensions you’re using, a screenshot of the issue and/or any errors reported in Tools -> Error Console.
“pf-kernel is another Linux kernel fork, that provides you with new useful features, that are not merged into mainline. It’s not based on any existing Linux fork or patchset, but some parts of Zen kernel may be merged if there’s no official release of needed patch. The name of this fork is not connected with BSD Packet Filter. «pf» means «post-factum» in the short form.”
At this point the latest patchset includes the following: * mainline update: 2.6.35.4
* -ck patchset (BFS included)
* BFQ
* TuxOnIce
* LinuxIMQ
Its main advantage over other forks seems to be that it’s regularly updated 🙂
* sys-kernel/pf-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.31_p9) (~)2.6.31_p9!b!s
(2.6.32_p16) (~)2.6.32_p16!b!s
(2.6.33_p4) (~)2.6.33_p4!b!s
(2.6.34_p7) (~)2.6.34_p7!b!s
(2.6.35_p7) (~)2.6.35_p7!b!s
{build deblob symlink}
Homepage: http://pf-kernel.org.ua/
Description: Linux kernel fork with new features, including the -ck patchset (BFS), BFQ, TuxOnIce and LinuxIMQ
Many thanks to Oleksandr for taking the time to create and maintain it 😀
The default bash shell prompt is anything but usable.
Information is compressed and the prompt turns into hell if you’re deep in a directory tree.
To improve the situation I decided to use a two line prompt. On the first line I have the current host, user and path with different colors, while on the second line I have nothing but the actual command prompt.
This way I can easily tell what system I’m on, what user I’m logged in as and what directory I’m in at a glance. I also have lots of space for my commands since the path doesn’t get in my way.
Here’s how it looks like:
To change your prompt when using bash, edit your ~/.bashrc file
(make sure you source ~/.bashrc in ~/.bash_profile, or just edit that file instead)
# how many lines you want it to save per session
URxvt*saveLines:32767
URxvt*troughColor:#000000
URxvt*scrollColor:#222222
URxvt*font: xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:pixelsize=11
# with this set to true, when an app sends a bell to the terminal, awesome hilights the appropriate tag(s) ;)
URxvt*urgentOnBell: true
# these three lines enable clicking on links to open them ;)
## if you want to enable tab support, append ,tabbed to the next line
## then use shift+down arrow to create tabs and shift+{left,right} arrows to switch between them
URxvt*perl-ext-common: default,matcher,-option-popup,-selection-popup,-realine
URxvt*matcher.button: 1
# don't forget to change this to your favorite browser
URxvt*urlLauncher: chromium
