Rod Begbie

I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'linux'

➠ March 25, 2009

Command-line Fu < The best UNIX commands on the web

Digg for stupid bash tricks. The “^foo^bar” syntax is new to me, and looks wicked handy.

Filed under : : :
via | ✲

➠ June 1, 2008

DenyHosts

Excellent Unix tool which watches for attacks on ssh and blocks malicious hosts from connecting. I’ve only just found that it has a “synchronization” mode which shares the knowledge of evil hosts. Installed on all my servers.

Filed under : : :
✲

➠ May 14, 2008

The Debian SSL fubar farrago - some light perspective

If you have a Debian or Ubuntu box and used it to generate an SSH key in the last couple of years, due to a rather heinous bug, there’s a high chance you have one of roughly 260,000 keys.

To put this in perspective, if your account was protected by a 4 lower-case-character password, it would be harder to brute-force access (264 = 456,976).

For the sake of the internet, follow the instructions to update the keys on your servers forthwith.

Filed under : : : : : :
0 comments | ✲

➠ March 26, 2008

Crossover Games

Wine for OS X and Linux especially designed to play graphically-intensive Windows games. The Orange Box and its contents are supported, and Audio-Surf ran OK for me, with some minor resolution-based oddness. Not sure it’s worth $40, though, when I can just reboot to Boot Camp.

Filed under : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ February 6, 2008

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software

The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.

Filed under : : : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ October 12, 2007

If you can read this…

…then my DNS-fu has worked, and you’re now hitting groovymother.com on its new server, a virtual Linux box running via Xen, hosted by VPSLink.com

For the last 6 years, all my sites have been hosted from my home, at the mercy of my (usually exceptionally-reliable) Speakeasy DSL connection. However, when the whims of BitTorrent take me, it can cause slowdowns, and virtual-server technology now means I can get root on a hosted server for less than the price of a cup of gin a day, so I’m putting my trust in a hosting company’s arms, and seeing how it works out.

(After signing up with VPSLink, I received a recommendation for Slicehost who offer similarly-priced services, so it’s good to know that switching shouldn’t be a problem if VPSLink turns out to suck balls for some reason)

Filed under : : : : : : :
0 comments | ✲

➠ May 3, 2007

ext3cow

“Ext3cow is an open-source, versioning file system based on ext3. It provides a time-shifting interface that allows a real-time and continuous view of the past. This allows users to access their file system as it appeared at any point in time.”

Filed under : : :
via | ✲

➠ May 1, 2007

Frets On Fire

Open source Guitar Hero-a-like.

Filed under : : : : : : :
✲

➠ January 4, 2007

Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Good to know — how to cleanly reboot a frozen Linux box when you can’t even get it to give you a terminal prompt.

Filed under : : :
via | ✲

Wormux

Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.

Filed under : : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ October 28, 2006

Frozen Bubble - the official home

Truly excellent open-source Bust-a-Move clone hits 2.0. Features, oh yes, internet multiplayer mode. My productivity hits new lows. (No Windows or OSX port yet, but hopefully only a matter of time)

Filed under : : : : :
✲

➠ October 10, 2006

Open Source madness!

Good commentary of the unpleasantness that’s about to unfold with this Firefox/Iceweasel fork. The two new “features” which will now ship with Debian, Ubuntu, et al are just the tip of an iceberg of confusion and incompatibility.

Filed under : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ October 9, 2006

TIP Using screen - Gentoo Linux Wiki

More in-depth screen-fu from the Gentoo Wiki. screen is now officially my favourite Linux utility EVER! (of the week).

Filed under : : :
✲

➠ October 4, 2006

Gentoo Linux Newsletter -- Using GNU screen

A little screen-fu — I didn’t realise that one screen session could encompass multiple screens.

Filed under : : :
✲

➠ July 4, 2006

The Tao of Mac - The Unswitch Saga: Get The T-Shirt

“I nearly switched to Ubuntu when Mark did…” hee.

Filed under : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ June 13, 2006

GParted -- LiveCD

Manoman is this handy. Boot up off the live CD and repartition your hard drive on the fly without losing data. It’s like PartitionMagic, but free, free and it doesn’t corrupt your data!

Filed under : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ June 4, 2006

BixData | Cluster and Systems Management

Free but not-free tool for system monitoring. Looks like a usable alternative to Nagios.

Filed under : : : : : :
✲

➠ May 18, 2006

JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

Cross-platform mountable network file-system storing your precious data with Amazon’s S3 service.

Filed under : : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ May 7, 2006

Server Monitoring With munin And monit

Cool. I’d been looking for a simple Linux monitoring tool like this a few weeks ago — Something simple that can plot load over time.

Filed under : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ April 12, 2006

AjaxTerm

Jeepers, this is a cool hack. VT100-emulator running in Javascript over AJAX to allow you to remote-control a server over HTTP.

Filed under : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ April 5, 2006

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Tool for running olde DOS games (Soundblaster emulation and all) in Windows/Linux/OSX. I’ll have to try getting “Jones In The Fast Lane” up and running with it.

Filed under : : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ March 19, 2006

Darik's Boot and Nuke

Bootdisk that fits on a 1.44Mb floppy which securely nukes every scrap of data off of hard drives. Handy to have if you’re about to sell an old computer.

Filed under : : : :
via | ✲

➠ March 6, 2006

Gentoo Linux 2006.0 Screenshots

Blimey. Gentoo’s gotten themselves one of them fancy high-falutin’ “installer” thingummies. There goes the neighbourhood!

Filed under : : :
✲

➠ February 18, 2006

A Look at GNOME 2.14

The now-traditional “What’s new in the next version of Gnome” post. As per usual, nothing that makes you fall off your chair screaming OMFGAWESOME, but it’s all welcome tweakage (especially the speeding up, since my Pentium3 laptop is pretty clunky these days)

Filed under : : : : :
✲

➠ February 8, 2006

VMWare Server

Fantastic news: VMWare are making their server product free(beer). I’m almost certainly going to use this for a dev server at work — Backup the virtual machine image every night, and if hardware crashes, just startup your backed-up image on a new machine. Also gets around the “You can’t create an image” limitation of the free VMWare Player app.

Filed under : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ January 3, 2006

Hamachi

To be tried-out: Cross-platform app that creates VPNs between computers — even if they’re behind firewalls. Downside: Requires connecting to a centrally-run server to initiate connection, which will soon be charging $$$.

Filed under : : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ December 7, 2005

fish: a user friendly command line shell

An interesting new Unix shell. Look at the screenshots for examples of it’s cool tab-completion fu.

Filed under : : : :
via | ✲

➠ December 2, 2005

The L in Linksys WRT54GL Stands for Linux

Linksys are now explicitly catering to the hardware hacker market by keeping their excellent Linux-based WRT54G routers available at a premium after downgrading the “consumer” model.

Filed under : : : :
via | ✲

➠ November 11, 2005

Celestia

Wow. An amazing free space “simulator” for Windows, OSX or Linux. Tip: Select “Demo” from the Help menu to get an idea of what it covers.

Filed under : : : : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ November 5, 2005

mplayerplug-in

The best video plugin for Linux I’ve found. Plays Quicktime, Windows Media and Real Video without complaint, hiccup, or browser crash.

Filed under : : : : :
✲

➠ October 21, 2005

VMware Player

This has great potential. VMWare have a free “player” allowing anyone to run pre-built virtual machines.

Filed under : : : : :
via | ✲

➠ October 7, 2005

the electric sheep screen-saver

My screensaver-of-choice — Collaboratively generate frames for gorgeously-trippy animations.

Filed under : : : : : :
✲

➠ March 12, 2005

Gentoo Building

Gentoo Building

I get my geek thrills by installing Gentoo, the Linux distribution that lets you build everything from source.

It takes a long time (especially on my 4-year-old Pentium 3 laptop), but it makes me happy!

Filed under : : : :
✲

➠ December 24, 2004

Linux on TV

Linux on TV

I finally got around to hacking my Linux laptop to enable the SVideo out. Hurrah! Now I can watch UKNova downloads on TV! (The screenshot you see is MythTV compiling)

Filed under : : : : :
✲

About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.

Powered By