Feeling nostalgic about your old Amiga?
It was my first contact with a command line interface (CLI), even before that dark MS-DOS thing come around into our lives, and made me addicted to it until the time being. Amiga CLI was colorful and cheerful, basically feeling our technology eager spirits with blue, white, black and orange rainbow…

So answering the question I self posed: Yes I do feel nostalgic.

Thus I messed up a bit with my terminal configuration, bashrc and DIR_COLORS to get me a feel of that remote times. So this is what I came up with:

Read more of Amiga 500 Terminal emulation

These articles on Ksplice blog describe how to map the NULL pointer to physical memory, and how to turn it into a kernel exploit (Thanks JB for the reference!).

Part I
Part II

Stop burning CD/DVD’s right now, unless you really need. This is what you have to do to mount an ISO image from a CD, DVD or floppy. Make sure you have persmissions to mount (start a session as root, run “su”, or use sudo… whatever works for you)

First create a mount point, for instance:
mkdir -p /mnt/iso

Then mount the file in that directory with:
mount -o loop disk1.iso /mnt/iso

That’s all! now the content of the ISO file (the same file structure you would find in a burnt media support) is availabe in your filesystem.

This is the scenario:

1) Have a pocket camera with zillions of megapixels and an endless memory card which take clear pictures of an ant’s eyebrow, but each pictures is 5MB?

2) Want to post this pictures on a website/blog or send them through email to a friend bragging about your ultra high-tech camera?

3)Realized your email/website account don’t have enough space or it would take ages to upload all those photos at higher resolution?

There’s a solution for you out there by ImageMagic. Read more of Mogrify this!

This is the scenario: A computer with two partitions, one with Windows XP and another with Linux – for the sake of the example, I’ll assume it’s Gentoo Linux, but probably it will be straightforward to adjust to your Linux distro.
VirtualBox is able to boot such Windows guest partition from a linux host, as it’s explained in the following steps (also I’ll expect that you’re familiar with the linux terminology). Read more of Boot a local (raw) Windows XP partition under Gentoo/Linux Host using VirtualBox

This command makes possible to join several PDF files into a single one using Ghostscript. Try to do the following in the command line:

gs -dBATCH -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=outputfile.pdf inputfile-1.pdf inputfile-2.pdf (...) inputfile-n.pdf

It has also the advantage to reduce size of the resulting PDF, even if you use only one input file.

When a package is emerged, the archives are stored into /usr/portage/distfiles (cleaning this directory now and then may free up some disk space) but temporary files in the compilation process are located in /var/tmp/portage. Disk access is somewhat slower than memory access, so if you have spare ram memory, this trick is meant for you. Read more of Speed up Gentoo’s emerge

To keep downloading the files while emerging, add the following line to your /etc/make.conf.

FEATURES="parallel-fetch"

There are other cool features that enhance your Portage, peek here.

Some days ago I was victim of email spoofing on my Gmail account. I was receiving emails from “me” with spam messages. For those who don’t know what spoofing is, there you go:

E-mail spoofing is a term used to describe fraudulent e-mail activity in which the sender address and other parts of the e-mail header are altered to appear as though the e-mail originated from a different source. Read more of Using Gmail filters to get rid of e-mail spoofing.