Gnu

If you’ve been around the open source community long enough, you’ve probably heard of people signing their VCS commits/tags. This post covers the why and how of signing your Git commits. The focus will be on commits but keep in mind that these tips equally apply to tags. Why Sign Your Commits The short answer is, signing your commits makes it harder for an attacker to impersonate you. Sure, if you work solo on rinky-dink toy projects, having your commits signed isn’t a big deal. Now consider the case where you make commits to an open source project with sensitive code or at your day job where you make commits and PRs on a product. It might be worth safeguarding those commits just a bit. ...

Do you have a bunch of dotfiles? Do you maintain a GitHub repo with all your dotfiles? Whenever you upgrade your machine, do you find yourself manually placing the dotfiles in the right spots in your home directory? If you answered yes to these questions, read on. Enter GNU Stow GNU Stow is a dotfile management utility. Stow has all the makings of a varsity athlete: Stow is small (a 32KB Perl script). Stow is simple to use with a solid manpage. Stow doesn’t get in the way of version controlling dotfiles. Real world Stow usage is pretty simple and best explained with an example. Imagine you had your i3wm and Bash configurations stored in your home directory. The layout might look something like this: ...

When debugging an embedded system, it’s common to work with raw data requiring conversion between decimal, hexadecimal, binary, and sometimes octal number systems. The Python REPL and printf shell utility do the job but are tedious to use for the simple task of base conversion. It would be nice to drop the overhead of format specifiers and fear of numerical limits. To ease the pain, I decided to write a command line utility that made conversion between positive binary, decimal, octal, and hexadecimal numbers of arbitrary size. ...

Who hasn’t been guilty of reusing passwords across multiple online services. If you make a habit out of reusing passwords, it’s pretty easy to get pwned not for just one service but many all at once. The modern day solution is to use a password manager. This article walks you through setting up password management across Linux and Android devices. Finding a Password Manager There’s no shortage of password managers to choose from. Your choice of password manager is dependent on what devices you use and what your typical workflow looks like. Here’s what a set of basic password manager requirements looks like: ...