The Pragmatic Addict

Background I run a very minimalist desktop (LXDE) which doesn’t have the facilities to allow for shared desktop.

Background Home automation is a relatively new thing for me.

Background If you’ve read my previous articles, you know I love to manage my linux computers through their serial console.

Background I’ve had great success using qemu on my x86_64 machines hosting various Windows servers, development environments etc.

Background Seemingly every Linux distibution uses GRUB as its bootloader.

Background Over the 20+ years of using various forms of Linux I always leaned into the Gnome side of the desktop, later moving to Xfce and then finally landing on LXDE.

Background Much to my pleasure, many home based devices (routers, media players, IoT etc) are moving away from unencrypted HTTP and moving to HTTPS.

Background qemu offers a basic NAT functionality to get guests on the internet through the host.

Background This is a fairly straight forward way to rip DVD/Blu-Ray movies.

Background A while ago I wrote an article on how to turn your Raspberry Pi into a serial console server.

If you are into any kind of tech support for Intel based machines, having a live boot usb thumb drive is essential.

Long ago in the early days of computers, nothing was reliable.

This was rather hard to find, it turns out that EVERYTHING wants to start ssh-agent.

Background I just recently cleaned out my horde of old motherboards and systems (most went to good homes).

Mar 20, 2026 Updated for Debian 13 Specs MacBook Air 13" (Late 2010) Model A1369 EveryMac.com Intel “Core 2 Duo” (SL9400) Memory: 2GB (kinda) nVidia GeForce 320M (256MB shared) Storage: 256GB Notes This work was done with Debian 13 The netboot installer d…

After 20+ years I hit a memory problem with one of my remote servers.

FreeDVDBoot - DVD Player Exploit This is a way to create a DVD disc with an exploit that soft mods the playstation to run wLaunchELF.

EVERY Linux & Windows Server install out of the box has two things: An administrator account A user account with no privileges EVERY Windows 7/10/11 etc install out of the box has two things: A DISABLED administrator account A user account with admin priv…

Note: I plan to keep this page updated with my findings as I experiment more and more.

This is technology from the old days but still proves to be very handy.

These are some notes I have for enabling client certificates in lighttpd on a test server.

For those of us grey beards who remember a simple 80x25 text terminal (or a C64 user who longed for 80 cols).

Every Windows install by default wants to create 3 partitions: boot, OS & recovery (WinRE).

This is a quick how-to.

This isn’t the end all of lists, I’ll add to it in the future.

2025-03-10 Added instructions below to shorten the USB cable.

strcasestr is a wonderful function which finds the first occurrence of the substring needle in the string haystack.

There are many ways to skin this cat.

Over the past 20 years I’ve writing quite a bit of cross platform C code using gcc and mingw.

I’m a linux command line junkie.

I’m a bit old school using the old BIOS bootloader stuff for years.

One of my hobbies is weight lifting but as I get older and during a workout, all math functions in my brain are non existant.

This is an ongoing entry on various tricks I’ve learned about using Wine.

One of the features lacking on a Raspberry PI is a Real Time Clock (RTC).

This is an easy way to give Linux members of group “scanner” access to USB based scanners.

I have an obstensibly large collection of DVD/BluRay/CD discs.

This script file will disable wifi once an ethernet cable is plugged in.

Recently I found myself on a large cruise ship for a week with “free” internet service.

I’m still amazed that keyboards still have the Caps Lock key and worse that it’s in the home row of typing.

Background I am infatuated with the Raspberry Pi computer and am always looking for a new use for one.

This is a very brief overview on how to configure a Raspberry Pi as a serial console server using conman and a USB to serial port adapter.

Background As with all projects this was to scratch an itch.

Background What better way to celebrate Star Wars Day than to have a movie marathon (in story chronological order) but put a Pragmatic twist on it.

Background One day a few years ago, I saw an article about a vending machine that prints short stories based on the number of minutes needed to read the story.

Linux From a terminal run ‘sudo dmesg’.