There's no Place Like ::1

If you ever wonder why MacOS users have a nice little command-line application called “open” to open an arbitrary file with the correct application, and you – a proud Linux user – don’t, you have come to the right place :)

If you use GNOME (KDE sucks :P) you probably have a nice little command-line application called “gnome-open”.

It does exactly what you are thinking. It find the mime-type of the file you pass as a parameter and use the GNOME configured application for that mime-type.

Since I am lazy (and probably you too) don’t forget to put this on your .bashrc (or equivalent):

alias open="gnome-open" 
alias o="gnome-open" 

Have fun with your console!

^{(Probably KDE (and others) have a similar application)}

Today I discovered that I’m addicted to Katapult, an application specially designed to provide quick and easy access to applications, bookmarks, music and more.

Unfortunately, it’s a KDE (QT) application. This means that using it on GNOME makes your system load and mantain in memory many KDE libraries just for a small application.

Today I asked myself “are there a similar application to GNOME?”. Some seconds later Google got me the solution: GNOME Launch Box.

This application works great! I don’t know if it was just for me, but I had to configure manually the shortcut to fire the gnome launch box. I used the instructions here.

Hope you like it too!

If you know me, I use LUKS for a long time. But there was always one thing that kept annoying me: it was not cool, every time I rebooted my computer, to go the the console and manually mount my encrypted hard drives.

I discovered today that there was already a solution: pam-mount. It is a nice PAM module that allows one to have automatically mounted the encrypted devices as soon as you enter your username/password do access your system.

I installed it on Ubuntu (apt-get install libpam-mount) and did a little bit of hacking on /etc/pam.d/common-session and /etc/security/pammount. What impressed me the most is that it worked like a charm on my first attempt! Now I can boot on my computer and GDM, and just put my username and password to access my box!

Of course you need an excellent user password because your hard-drive security depends on his strength.

Just a note…

If after installing and configuring pam_mount you start hitting problems with your cron (cron segfaults everytime) remove pam_mount.

I don’t understand why this happened and I really don’t want to know. I spent 30 precious minutes hacking GDB just to see that the problem was on pam_mount…

I will need this in the near future for sure:

\newenvironment{warn}
{
  \medskip
  \begin{minipage}[t]{0.1\linewidth}
    \vspace{0pt}
    \Huge{\Pointinghand}
  \end{minipage}%
  \begin{minipage}[t]{0.9\textwidth}
    \vspace{0pt}
    \begin{small}
}
{
  \end{small}
  \end{minipage}
  \medskip
}