This week's techmail is Manipulate monitor displays easily with the xrandr extension which talks about how to automatically resize, re-orientate, and reconfigure your monitors using xrandr. xrandr is really cool and shines especially bright when used with laptops and dual-head displays. It certainly makes docking my laptop much simpler, and …

This week's TechMail is Set up rsyslog to store syslog messages in MySQL which gives a brief rundown of how to setup rsyslog to log messages in a MySQL database so that you can use a viewer such as phpLogCon in order to view/filter them. For me, this is …

This week's TechMail was Change default applications easily in GNOME which looks at how you can configure GNOME to use your preferred applications to open certain file types (i.e. if you had a specific IDE you wanted to edit PHP or Python files with, or a specific media player …

Ran into an issue today where I needed to convert a Maildir containing over 50k messages to mbox format and couldn't really find any good tools. So I found this blog post about using mutt to do it. Unfortunately, it converted one Maildir to another. =( One crucial piece is missing …

Last week's techmail was 2009: A Linux year in review in which I took a (brief) look at some of the happenings in 2009. Of course I had to add the obligatory "year of the desktop linux" routine but don't worry... I didn't make any silly predictions regarding it.

This week's TechMail is Learn to use extended file attributes in Linux to boost security which takes a look at using chattr, getfattr, setfattr, getfacl, and setfacl; tools that can be used to offer more granular security to files and directories. Being able to use SELinux or GrSecurity, AppArmor, and …

This week's TechMail was DIY pfSense firewall system beats others for features, reliability, and security which takes a look at pfSense which is, in my opinion, one of the best open source firewall systems around. I've used quite a few, and for a long time when I was developing Annvix …

This week's TechMail is Don't need groupware? Organize your life with Osmo which looks at using Osmo as a pretty basic, yet useful, personal information manager. Osmo is quite basic, but if that's all you need (i.e. don't need Outlook or Zimbra or collaboration or internet connectivity), it's a …

This week's TechMail is Learn to use Git version control for added flexibility which talks about some of the basics of using Git. This was good for me since I'm a subversion monkey, but since a lot of projects are using Git now, I really needed to get the basics …

This week's TechMail is Fedora 12 boasts enhanced performance, improved reporting, better graphics which is a great big gushy welcome to Constantine! The tip highlights some of my favourite new features in Fedora 12. I've been running the beta on my new HP machine for about a month now and …