Month: March 2015

Link: Hack Old USB Drives into a Mini RAID on a Mac

Most of us have a lot of old USB thumb drives lying around. Sometimes you just got a new larger capacity or less grubby looking one, but often you just accumulate them as they are the most popular storage medium and are used and discarded as needed because they are cheap.

Once they have served their purpose, the ones you don’t use just sit in a drawer or on a desk until you throw them away or lose them (and you don’t even remember it existed). But what if you could combine them and make a higher capacity drive to plug into a media player in a TV or back up your USB drives that are in use?

This article explains how to turn old USB drives into a mini RAID to give them new life.

Full article here:
Hack Old USB Drives into a Mini RAID on a Mac (Make Tech Easier)

Link: How To Install And Configure Squid Proxy On Ubuntu And Debian

Squid Proxy is  a a great proxy server mainly used for caching frequently requested web content in order to speed up response time and also save network bandwidth. It supports many different protocols such as HTTP, FTP, TLS, SSL, Internet Gopher and HTTPS. Although it was originally designed to run as a daemon on Unix-like systems there have been several ports to windows, but according to wikipedia more current versions are not being developed.

Squid Proxy is released under the GNU General Public License.

In this tutorial you will learn how to install and setup Squid Proxy on Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions. Just follow each step of this guide carefully and everything will be ok.

Full article here:
How To Install And Configure Squid Proxy On Ubuntu And Debian (Unixmen)

Link: How to Easily Create Audiobooks From Text Files in OS X

The primary use of the Voiceover system on the Mac is accessibility for blind or partially sighted users. But it may have occurred to you that it would be a fine idea to use the Voiceover system to produce audiobooks and spoken word prompts for your media, videos, presentations and music.

The problem is the voice is generated in real-time and is not saveable, so if you want to use the voice in any other program, you have to rip it somehow. The good news is that this facility is built in. The bad news is that it’s hidden unless you know where it is.

In this article, we will be showing you how to capture voiceover speech and use it in your own projects.

Full article here:
How to Easily Create Audiobooks From Text Files in OS X (Make Tech Easier)

Link: The Difference Between Window Managers and Desktop Environments

Curious about what the differences between window managers and desktop environments are? Say no more!

In this article, I’ll go over what a window manager is, as well as what a desktop environment is. I’ll talk about the pros and cons of each to better help you decide which one is right for you!

Full article here:
The Difference Between Window Managers and Desktop Environments (Make Tech Easier)

Link: How to access Gmail from the command line on Linux with Alpine

If you are a command-line lover, I am sure that you welcome with open arms any tool that allows you to perform at least one of your daily tasks using that powerful work environment, e.g., from scheduling appointments and managing finances to accessing Facebook and Twitter.

In this post I will show you yet another pretty neat use case of Linux command-line: accessing Google’s Gmail service. To do so, we are going to use Alpine, a versatile ncurses-based, command-line email client (not to be confused with Alpine Linux). We will configure Gmail’s IMAP and SMTP settings in Alpine to receive and send email messages via Google mail servers in a terminal environment. At the end of this tutorial, you will realize that it will only take a few minimum steps to use any other mail servers in Alpine.

Granted there are already outstanding GUI-based email clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution or even web interface. So why would anyone be interested in using a command-line email client to access Gmail? The answer is simple. You need to get something done quickly and want to avoid using system resources unnecessarily. Or you are accessing a minimal headless server that does not have the X server installed. Or the X server on your desktop crashed, and you need to send emails urgently before fixing it. In all these situations Alpine can come in handy and get you going in no time.

Some of us older folks may remember that one of the first command-line based email programs was named Pine.  Wonder if the creators of this program had that one in mind when they chose the name?

Full article here:
How to access Gmail from the command line on Linux with Alpine (Xmodulo)

Link: A List Of Free And Open Source Control Panels

To manage your businesses and your websites remotely you need to use control panel. With such tool you will have the possibility to manage all your web services under the same location which is very fantastic. Without control panel, you will need to install or compile specific tools such as: Php, MySQL and others on your host server which is not usually recommended with normal people. Since they need to have technical knowledge. With control panel, no expert knowledge of server administration is needed, just install it and benefit of its features. These web based control panels offers you the possibility also to manage your emails accounts, FTP accounts, disk space, bandwidth and many others.

The most known and powerful control panels are cPanel and Plesk. Unfortunately they are paid softwares and a monthly fee will be demanded to install them on the suitable server. But don’t worry, there are other alternative open source control panels available for every one with the same features and no fees are required. You will discover those tools in our article then later you can give us your attitudes.

Full article here:
A List Of Free And Open Source Control Panels (Unixmen)

Link: Google Code Will Shut Down In January 2016 Because Almost No One Uses It Anymore

Google has announced the end of another service, and this one is a shocker—Google Code is going away on January 25th, 2016. That gives you about ten months to get your code off of Google’s servers before it’s gone forever. Why is Google breaking your heart like this? According to the company, Google Code simply isn’t very popular anymore.

Full article here:
Google Code Will Shut Down In January 2016 Because Almost No One Uses It Anymore (Android Police)
Official announcement:
Bidding farewell to Google Code (Google Open Source Blog)

Link: How to Secure Your Newly Installed Ubuntu

Without a doubt, a freshly installed Linux system is less susceptible to malware, spyware and hacking than a freshly installed Windows system. However, most Linux systems are configured with some default settings that are inherently insecure. Some Linux distros are designed to be installed with very secure defaults, but this results in systems that have a significant difficulty for new users, especially those who are not computer security professionals.

Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux distro today, and this is due to a large number of factors, one of which is its friendliness to new users. Many of Ubuntu’s default settings are geared towards allowing users to use their systems immediately after installation with as little disruption as possible. While this has its positives, it also results in a system that has a few weaknesses, trading them for user convenience. This article will walk you through some basic but powerful configuration changes that show you how to secure your newly installed Ubuntu from many of the common attack methods.

Full article here:
How to Secure Your Newly Installed Ubuntu (Make Tech Easier)

Link: List Of Tools To Monitor The Health Of Your Linux System

Achieving good performance from a computer or network is an important part of system administration.The monitoring and maintenance of the system is the most important task listed in the checklists for daily tasks of a system and network administrator. There are many commands line utilities created for this purpose.

This article describes how you can monitor services and attributes of Linux/UNIX servers using command line, such as:

  • CPU load
  • Bandwidth
  • Memory usage
  • Disk usage
  • Logged in users
  • Running processes
  • etc.

Let’s start.

Full article here:
List Of Tools To Monitor The Health Of Your Linux System (Unixmen)