Monthly Archives: October 2008

How to kill a process that uses too much CPU

Cleaning up my ‘dump’ directory, I found this aging script I got from somewhere, which will check the current CPU usage of a program and kill it if it uses too much. This is useful if you are for some reason forced to run buggy, closed source software which get stuck in endless loops when […]

Fun with “beep”

At the end of my huge list of stuff I always install on a Debian box, I put a “beep” to let me know when it’s done, because I will no doubt be doing something else, most likely on a different screen, when it’s done. Now, suppose you run a lot of processes you want […]

Disable .bash_history logging in bash, Debian

I hate the .bash_history file. It never contains what I want, screws up when using multiple sessions and generally contains junk. I like to disable the .bash_history file, while still keeping the ability to push the “up”-key to scroll through earlier commands in the same session. The way to do this is to set $HISTFILE […]

Encrypted swap in Debian

So, you got your home directory encrypted, but you’re not sure what sensitive material could end up in swap? After a long day of running a whole lot of applications and processes, many interesting things could potentially wind up there. So here’s how to make sure that data is completely garbled after a reboot.

Vista file transfer estimates: WTF?

In Windows XP, it seemed like the estimated transfer time of files in a folder, when copying that folder from one place to another, was estimated purely based on the sum of the file sizes and the current transfer speed. It also seemed to have a preference for transferring the larger files first.

VESA console modes

Most linux kernels accept a “vga=” command line parameter, which will set the resolution to use during boot. This is a short list of video modes which can be used, given your kernel supports your video card well enough, and the video card can handle the resulution. My computer has the correct resolution all the […]

Motorized Madness

I rarely post just a link, but this casemod is just too awesome: http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showpost.php?p=172860&postcount=377