How to disable the ultra annoying Startup Sound on Mac OS X
I passionately *H*A*T*E* the startup chime that my Mac makes when I switch it on. At least on my MacBook, if the volume is turned down before I shutdown, the system restarts silently. I guess it’s somehow linked to the internal speakers. Sadly on my Mac Mini this approach doesn’t work: due to the lack of “real” internal speakers , the Mini always wakes up with that horrible eighties K-DONNNNNNNNG noise, waking up my wife and large parts of the neighbourhood. But there’s good news: thanks to the nvram command we...
read moreHow to prevent your MacBook from sleeping when you close the lid
There’s a built-in command line tool in every Mac called caffeinate that prevents your computer from going to sleep, even when the lid is closed. This is the default behaviour if an external monitor is attached, but if that’s not the case, MacBooks just go to sleep as soon as you close the lid. While several GUI tools are available (such as InsomniaX, or the Nosleep Extension, you can also call caffeinate from the command line without installing anything. Open the Terminal app (under Applications – Utilities), and simply...
read moreHow to view Plesk websites even if your domain does not resolve to your server
It’s never good if your server is working fine, but the domains that resolve to it are down for one reason or another. This has happened to me TWICE this year already, and both times it was out of my hands (yes @ENOM, I’m looking at you). Many of my clients use websites for data storage, and while it’s not nice when one goes down, it’s even worse if you can’t access information you may have saved as part of a web application. Thankfully there is a way to access Plesk websites even if the domain no longer resolves...
read moreHow to specify FTP credentials in command line scripts
It’s easy to establish an FTP connection using the ftp command from the Linux Command Line. Sadly this command does not accept login credentials as parameters – which means that if we use it in a script, our script will pause and wait for us to type those credentials in manually. Not really suitable for automated backups. Thanks to a clever mechanism called netrc we can create a file in the home directory of the user who runs the script and provide credentials there. Let me show you how this works. First we create a file called...
read moreGetting started with Jekyll on CentOS 7
It’s not quite as easy to get up and running with Jekyll as the Quick Start Guide makes it sound. But it’s not super difficult either – if explained from one human to another. Here’s how I got Jekyll working on a vanilla CentOS 7 instance. Installing some necessary packages Before we can install Jekyll using Rubygems, we need a few packages which aren’t with us by default. One comes from the Fedora EPEL repository, so let’s enable that first: yum install epel-release I love how easy this has become since...
read moreHow to mount EXT4 partitions on Android Jelly Bean
I was racking my brains over how to mount an SD card formatted with anything other than FAT32 on my Android device. Jelly Bean and Kit Kat automatically mount FAT32 partitions, but they seem to ignore native Linux file systems – which Android clearly understands. Apparently there’s a $1.54 app on the Play Store that can auto-mount cards (called EzyMount), but there is a way to do this for free: namely the old fashioned manual way. All we need is root access to the device and a Terminal Emulator (available from the Play Store). In...
read moreThe Debian Experience: Cheat Sheet for CentOS and Fedora users
I’ve just installed a LAMP stack on my Nook Tablet using Debian. However I’ve been using CentOS since 2008 and I’m so used to how things are done there that it was a bit of a culture shock doing relatively simple things “on the other side”. It’s like a country whose language you don’t speak well enough. Here are a few pointers for how to so these simple things in Debian and Ubuntu, for CentOS and Fedora Users: Installing Packages While I’m used to yum and it’s super easy search and install...
read moreHow to show uptime and reboot history on your Mac the command line?
Usually the top command shows you how long a Linux system is up and running – but sadly not on OS X, or Darwin more specifically. There is however a command line tool with the descriptive name uptime which will tell you how long your Mac has been running, precisely the line that’s missing from top on OS X: uptime 14:37 up 14 days, 38 mins, 4 users, load averages: 1.39 1.42 1.38 If you have the OS X Server App installed, it will show you this value in the GUI on the Overview screen too. Reboot History Sometimes it’s also nice...
read moreHow to find your CPU details from the command line
It’s often necessary to know what the exact type of CPU that’s installed on your system. For example, you may need to know if you’re dealing with a dual core or quad core system, or a 32/64 bit system. Only the CPU can tell you this. Here’s how to find out the string you need for further investigation. Windows From the command line, execute the wmic command with the following parameters: wmic cpu get name Name Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz Thanks to Jonathan @ Next of Windows for this tip! Windows...
read moreHow to find which package provides a command in yum
Sometimes you know you need a package, but when you try to install it with yum you’ll get a message like “No matches found”. Yet you’re sure the package exists because you’ve used it before. This can happen if the package in question is part of a set which installs multiple packages. The net-tools package springs to mind. yum has a great option called whatprovides with which you can query what package you need to install to use a command. Let’s try it out! Say I wanted to install mkfs.vfat which is not...
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