HOWTOs

Running GNOME in a Container

Containerizing the GUI separates your work and play. Virtualization has always been a rich man's game, and more frugal enthusiasts—unable to afford fancy server-class components—often struggle to keep up. Linux provides free high-quality hypervisors, but when you start to throw real workloads at the host, its resources become saturated quickly. No amount of spare RAM shoved into an old Dell desktop is going to remedy this situation. If a properly decked-out host is out of your reach, you might want to consider containers instead.

Build Your Own Internet Radio Receiver

Tune in to communities around the world with the push of a button. When I get home at night, I like to tune into the world with the push of a button. I've lived in lots of different places—from Dunedin, New Zealand, to Santa Fe, New Mexico—and in each town, I've come to love a radio station (usually a community radio station) that embodies the spirit of the place. With the push of a button, I can get a bit back in sync with each of these places and also visit new communities, thanks to internet radio.

Testing Models

In my last few articles, I've been dipping into the waters of "machine learning"—a powerful idea that has been moving steadily into the mainstream of computing, and that has the potential to change lives in numerous ways.

Is the Moon Waxing or Waning?

In my last article, I talked about the complications of calculating the phase of the moon and decided simply to scrape the same website that Google uses.

Flash ROMs with a Raspberry Pi

I previously wrote a series of articles about my experience flashing a ThinkPad X60 laptop with Libreboot. After that, the Libreboot project expanded its hardware support to include the ThinkPad X200 series, so I decided to upgrade. The main challenge with switching over to the X200 was that unlike the X60, you can't perform the initial Libreboot flash with software.

Secret Agent Man

It used to be that only the paranoid among us focused on strict security practices, yet these days, it seems like people are stepping up their games with respect to encryption, password policy and how they approach their computers in general. Although I always have considered myself more inside that paranoid camp than outside of it, I even have found myself stepping up my game lately.

Own Your DNS Data

I honestly think most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Even if they have some inkling along those lines, I still imagine many think of the data they leak only in terms of individual facts, such as their name or where they ate lunch.

Simple Server Hardening

These days, it's more important than ever to tighten up the security on your servers, yet if you were to look at several official hardening guides, they read as though they were written for Red Hat from 2005. That's because they were written for Red Hat in 2005 and updated here and there through the years.

The Weather Outside Is Frightful (Or Is It?)

Blistery cold weather is sinking in, which ought to ignite an instinctual desire to get your house in order and monitor it so the water pipes don't freeze and burst. So, let's take a timely look at a project setting up some temperature probes in various areas, reading them and reporting in a custom dashboard.

Understanding Firewalld in Multi-Zone Configurations

Stories of compromised servers and data theft fill today's news. It isn't difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of a recently exposed vulnerability or gain control using a stolen password.

Let's Go to Mars with Martian Lander

This is the beginning of a series of articles where I develop a variation on the classic lunar-lander game themed around the planet Mars. To do this in three dimensions can be rather complicated, so in the spirit of the original arcade game (that I became rather obsessed with, I should admit), I'm going to tackle the simplified two-dimensional problem.

My Childhood in a Cigar Box

I grew up in the 1980s. That meant we drank far too much Kool-Aid, and on Saturday mornings, we got up early to watch cartoons. It also was the heyday of arcades, but I lived in the ghetto of Detroit and couldn't afford quarters to play games. Plus, there were none anywhere near the neighborhood where I lived. For me, the first real video-game experience was the Atari 2600.

Smith Charts for All

I've covered several different programs that are useful when doing electrical engineering in the past. In this article, I want to look at a program called linsmith that helps you do calculations or see how different parameters behave.

The Tiny Internet Project, Part III

In a previous article, I introduced the Tiny Internet Project, a self-contained Linux project that shows you how to build key pieces of the internet on a single computer using virtualization software, a router and free open-source applications.
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