Moved to tag retrogaming.

Now that it’s clear what exactly was taken at the (last) LastPass breach, it may be a good time to re-evaluate how do you keep your passwords secure. (Of course, if you’re on LastPass, you’ll need to rotate all your passwords and add MFA where possible. And then move on. They fsck up.) So what are the options for your passwords? You could: pick a cloud provider with a better track record. self-host your own password manager web service. use a portable password manager with a browser plug-in. Manage the safe synchronisation between devices by setting up self-hosted file-hosting service. I am not a fan of 1. Besides being a waiting game to find out if they make the same bad choices as LastPass, a service with millions of users is a very likely target. Point 2 is certainly better, but I prefer to add an extra line of defense. ...

(In case you don’t know rakudo-pkg: it’s a project to provide native packages and relocatable builds of Rakudo for Linux distributions.) The downward spiral of Travis since it was taken over by a Private Equity firm (there is a pattern here), triggered a long coming refactoring of the rakudo-pkg workflow. Until now the packages were created on Travis because it supported running Linux containers so we could tailor the build for each distribution/release. Almost at the same time JFrog announced it was sunsetting Bintray and other services popular with FOSS projects. The deb and rpm repos needed a new home. ...

We’ve had a week of heated discussion within the Perl 6 community. It is the type of debate where everyone seems to lose. It is not the first time we do this and it certainly won’t be the last. It seems to me that we have one of those about every six months. I decided not to link to many reiterations of the debate in order not to feed the fire. ...

There was an interesting discussion on #perl6 (irc.freenode.net) about the use of rakudobrew as a way for end-users to install Rakudo Perl 6 (see how-to-get-rakudo [dead link to page on Rakudo’s website]). rakudobrew, inspired by perlbrew, is a way to manage (and compile) different versions of rakudo. nine argued that it’s primarily meant as a tool for rakudo developers. Because of the increased complexity (e.g. when dealing with modules), it’s not targeted at end-users. While being a big fan of rakudobrew, I agree with nine. ...

(This is an old post kept because it’s linked from several places. I have no idea if it’s still applicable.) The Belgian ISPs Proximus and Telenet both provide access to a network of hotspots. A nice recent addition is the use of alternative ssids for “automatic” connections instead of a captive portal where you login through a webpage. Sadly, their support pages provide next to no information to make a safe connection to these hotspots. ...

Use the following command: VBoxManage modifyhd /path/to/<disk>.vdi --resize <size in megabytes> e.g.: VBoxManage modifyhd /home/me/VMs/Win7x86.vdi --resize 32000 In case you have snapshots you have to merge them first. The disk will be resized but the Operating System won’t see it yet. You need to expand it within the Guest OS. In Windows you can go to “Computer Management - Storage - Disk Management” and extend your disk. On Linux, you need to boot from a live distribution and extend it with a tool like gparted. ...

On most Linux distributions, you can use the graphical “disks” application to create Luks+ext4 partitons. The defaults are sane. However, it’s still advisable to put random data on the new disk before encryption. If you use USB disks for off-site backups, it’s a good idea to encrypt them: Install the cryptography software: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup Write some random data to your disk (we will assume it’s called /dev/sdx, type “dmesg” after inserting the disk to figure out the device, or if it’s windows formatted and automounted have a look at the output of “mount”): sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdx bs=4K This will taken a long time, maybe a few days (create some IO). A good -shorter- compromise (a day) is: ...

You may have backupped your music CDs using a single flac file instead of a file for each track. In case you need to split the cd-flac, do this (instruction for Debian/Ubuntu): Install the needed software. sudo apt-get install cuetools ffmpeg flac shntool In case the source file is one unsplitted ape file, you can convert it to flac first. ffmpeg -i sample.ape sample.flac In case the cue file is not a separate file, but included in the flac file itself, split them. metaflac --show-tag=CUESHEET sample.flac | grep -v ^CUESHEET > sample.cue (NB: The regular syntax is metaflac --export-cuesheet-to=sample.cue sample.flac, however often the cue file in embedded in a tag instead of the cuesheet block). ...