Did you know that if you press “~” then C while in an ssh session, you get access to several useful commands? You can set up new local and remote forwarding, or stop existing forwarding, all while the connection is still running. From inside the session. But one little-known fact is that you can also run arbitrary local commands too.
The Problem: You need to access a remote system with rsync to back it up. But some of the files or directories you need to back up need root permissions to read. You need to automate the backups, so you can’t use a password or passphrase. But you really don’t want to allow passwordless logins to the remote, and especially not as root! So what to do?
I think the following policy should apply to company user accounts (not personal ones like Facebook or Google accounts, but accounts at workplaces). The bigger the workplace, the more important these are:
CreateNSW is a NSW government agency that is supposed to promote creativity. But when one of the beneficiaries of a grant made through Screenworks, a charity CreateNSW supports, made a fairly pointed video about climate change, CreateNSW stepped in to demand it be taken off the Internet – in this case, taken off Facebook and removed from Instagram.
Sometimes, you need a fresh Firefox. One that is exactly as if you had just installed it. Nothing cached, no cookies, clean. Or perhaps you use different Firefox profiles, for different purposes, and don’t want to have to install all your favourite extensions and configuration changes every time you create a new profile. This post describes one way to achieve both those things. While this post tells how to do it in Linux, you could certainly adapt the methods for Windows or whatever. All you need is Firefox, a way to start it, and a scripting language.
As described in another post, I use Firefox profiles to keep various activities separate – different banks, different AWS accounts and so on. It’s easy enough to use them from the command line, but it is much nicer to just click on an icon and have the right profile start up. Here is how to do that for one window manager, Ubuntu’s Unity.
Out of the box, all your Firefox windows share resources between them. Even with so-called “private browsing” enabled, a lot of what you do is shared between your Firefox tabs and windows. I often want to be logged into Amazon AWS in several different accounts at once, but even if I do that in different tabs or even in different windows of the same browser profile, I can only use one account at a time. All the windows and tabs magically track the most recent login. The answer is to use more than one profile.
Dr Stephen Duckett of the Grattan Institute wrote a particularly poor piece on the My Health Record system. His article is available here:
This post is my response, lightly edited with some footnotes added.
Today on a mailing list I frequent someone accused the Australian Government’s MyHR (“MyHealthRecord”) system of being designed for the bureaucrats, not to further patients’ interests. Another person responded, saying that it was wrong to accuse people of deliberately designing the system that way. Strangely enough I agree with both of them – but the former more than the latter.
Thunderbird in Linux, for some reason, still does not understand GIO filesystems. If you have a network location connected in your file manager (such as Nautilus) you can browse around, copy files and so on – but Thunderbird cannot see those locations. In particular, it can’t attach files out of those locations, not can it save attachments to those locations. Luckily, gvfs provides a workaround.