Today’s article is just another fun article. In this article, we’re going to learn how to have Christmas in the terminal. You won’t learn much of anything useful, but you may have some mild entertainment. Read on!
As you know, a lot of these articles are things you can do in a terminal. So, what’s better than making a Christmas tree in the terminal? It seems like a reasonable article to write, as today’s article will have been published on Christmas Day.
Not everyone who reads this site will be among those who celebrate Christmas. Personally, I’m an atheist that kinda appreciates the Buddhist philosophies. I celebrate Christmas as an excuse to share good times with friends and family, a chance to give back to those who have enriched my life.
So, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, that’s fine. You don’t have to participate in this article. You could also just call it a Holiday Tree, I suppose. Hopefully you’ll use this opportunity to show your appreciation for those around you, even if you celebrate Festivus!
Alright, that’s enough ‘serious’ stuff for one article. Let’s just get into how to have Christmas in the terminal!
Christmas In The Terminal:
As the title implies, and like so many other articles, you’re gonna need an open terminal in order to have Christmas in the terminal. So, open your terminal of choice. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.
With your terminal now open, download a handy script to get started:
That video should not autoplay. You’ll have to press the play button on your own. I too dislike any videos that webmasters deem should be automatically played. I assume you dislike that as well. So… You’re welcome!
Anyhow, there you have it… You have a Christmas tree in your terminal, just as the title suggested you would. Happy Holidays!
Closure and Some Thanks:
When I started this site, I was excited if I got twenty visitors in a single day. Well, the site has grown a whole lot since then. It has become an important part of my life and the thanks goes to you for reading, commenting, encouraging, providing feedback, etc… Without all that, I’d have never kept it up this long. So, thanks!
As for Christmas, I hope you’re all having a great day today. If you want to give me one gift, get offline (after rating the article, of course) and spend some time letting your friends and family know how much you appreciate them. It’s a good day to do so, even if you don’t particularly care for the holiday.
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This is just a PSA type of article, about how to cancel your LastPass account. Below are the reasons why you might want to cancel your LastPass account and how you can go about actually canceling that account.
Below is a copy of a recent email from LastPass:
Dear LastPass Customer,
We recently notified you that an unauthorized party was able to gain access to a third-party cloud-based storage service which is used by LastPass to store backups. Earlier today, we posted an update to our blog with important information about our ongoing investigation. This update includes details regarding our findings to date, recommended actions for our customers, as well as the actions we are currently taking.
We thank you for your patience and continued support of LastPass.
The Team at LastPass
Click the link in the quoted text for more information.
I can no longer trust LastPass with my passwords and wanted to quit their services, closing my account. The only link I could easily find was at the bottom of their email – and that would simply unsubscribe you from their email list.
With the help of @Condobloke on Linux.org, I was eventually able to find how to close my LastPass account (so I’m told by LastPass). When closing my account, they asked for a reason. The reason I gave was:
I no longer have faith in your security
For the record, I had never used LastPass for anything. I had just signed up for an account. I never actually used the extension or their services.
Cancel Your LastPass Account:
The first link you’ll see is in their email, and all that option does is remove you from their mailing list. You’re ONLY unsubscribing to their email list, not actually removing your account.
Link left plain on purpose. That link will ONLY remove you from their mailing list. It will not delete your account. So, I recommend deleting your account before removing yourself from the mailing list.
To delete your account, you need a link provided by @Condobloke:
Again, the link is left plain on purpose. That link will only get you started.
When you have logged in and clicked the button to remove your account, your account is still not deleted. You need to check your email and they send you an additional link. You can use that link to remove your account, remembering to confirm it when they ask time and time again.
When they ask you for a reason as to why you’re removing your account, you might want to tell them that it’s because you can no longer trust their security. They had the chance to be secure and failed. They might be making the ‘right steps’ now, but those steps should have been made before now.
What You Can Do:
If you’re going to use a password manager, you are better off getting one where you control the data. That means you want an ‘offline password manager’ that’s free and (hopefully) open source (so it can be audited, if need be).
I do not have enough experience with offline password managers to make a recommendation. I also am not going to be the one to suggest a specific product only to find out I sent you barking up the wrong tree. So, my suggestion is that you use your favorite search engine and look up ‘offline password manager’. Then, pick what you think works best for you.
I’ve done some looking and this article looks solid. I make no recommendations based on that link, it just looks pretty thorough to me. The article may contain errors and I’m not responsible for that, as I lack the time to dig deeper into this due to a rather impressive winter storm.
Good luck and do due diligence before deciding on a specific offline password manager platform. Read reviews, check security history, make sure it’s easy enough for you to use, and make sure it works with the software you intend it to work with.
Closure:
Well, I don’t use the ‘News’ category often, but this seemed like an important article to get out there. It’s time sensitive so it’s not going to be scheduled for publication, it’ll be published as soon as I’m done proofreading it.
Stay safe out there. Remember, “Practice safe hex!”
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Today’s article is just a quick one, a meta article. I try to write one of these every month, at the most, or when things happen around the site that I think folks would be interested in.
So, for a while, there were no Google ads. It turned out a site I added to my AdSense account was considered ‘invalid traffic’, which is a vague term that seems to mean it’s whatever Google says it is when they say it. I resolved that issue.
At that point, ads were being shown again – and I know folks clicked on ’em. My readers are kinda creatures of habit, so I’m positive there were clicks. For whatever reason, Google gave me no credit for those clicks.
Then, the pay period ended…
It could be coincidence, but the site started generating ad revenue when the pay period ended and a new one began. The site has since been getting credit for your clicks. While I like your clicks, I want to remind folks:
Do not click ads to make me happy. Only click ads if you’re truly interested.
If you’re legitimately interested, feel free to click an ad or two… Otherwise, just don’t click. Thanks for both!
Also, I’ve tried to enable a new feature. It’s provided by Google and it’s a nag for those who block ads. This should be EASILY dismissed and not nag you all that often, like once a month or something like that. If the nag in any way interferes with the functioning of the site, please let me know.
For whatever reason, I can’t seem to trigger the ad block nag screen. This makes it difficult to debug.
Meta Stuff:
So, I originally thought the ‘invalid traffic’ was because this site, Linux-Tips, was getting massive increases in traffic. After all, nobody would define ‘invalid traffic’ well enough for me and the site was definitely growing at a good clip. I figured this was the problem, but I was wrong. It was the other site that I added.
What is this massive traffic? Well, it’s not massive when compared to the big sites, but it’s definitely pretty respectable. Last month we had more than 10,000 unique visitors, and those people visited more than 18,000 times.
My stats are kinda wonky and I’m thinking it’s counting some bot traffic when it’s counting the pages displayed, because in November it claims we displayed more than 1.3 million pages. That’s a whole lot of pages for those visitor numbers, so I think it’s just not accurate.
The bandwidth has gone up accordingly. I now regularly exceed the free tier at the CDN (quic.cloud). Last month, but seemingly not this month, I had to make another deposit to pay for ‘page optimizations’. So, expenses pile up! You don’t have to donate, but you could if you wanted. I will not complain!
I pay for the CDN so that the site is pretty much always available no matter where you are on the globe, and so that it loads quickly from servers that are closer to your location than my actual server. A quick loading site with high availability seems to be a good idea to me.
Some Data:
The three articles that got the most traffic in the past 28 days is:
I am not sure why those are the most popular articles. They’re not the pages I’d think would be the most popular, but I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing with this whole SEO thing. I just smash buttons and hope something good comes out the other end.
The three most used search terms to find this site via Google, again for the past 28 days, would be:
screenfetch vs neofetch permitrootlogin prohibit-password restart teamviewer command line
That’s technically three out of the top four, as the first one is pretty much the same as what’s listed – it’s just in reverse. Lots of people wanna learn about the differences between the two (screenfetch and neofetch) via Google. Again, don’t ask me why.
So far this month:
The busiest day is Monday, by a good margin. The vast majority of my traffic is from the United States. The average person spends 199 seconds (3 min 19 sec) per visit. 96.1% of my visitors are using Linux. 85.5% are using a browser that identifies as Google Chrome. Google search accounts for most of my traffic. Linux.org accounts for the second most, but it’s truly dwarfed by Google results. Last month we used ~25 GB of bandwidth.
Got any other numbers you’re interested in? If so, leave a comment. I’ll be happy to let you know – if I actually have those numbers. It’s also important to realize that every single stat application (especially ones like Google Analytics) is horribly inaccurate. I rely on AWStat the most, because it’s the closest to accurate for some of these numbers. Google Analytics should not be even remotely trusted – but still has some useful information, useful for spotting trends.
Closure:
And there you have it, you have another nice meta article. I’d actually planned on another article, but I decided I’d watch American football and just write a meta article. It seemed like the thing to do. The next article will be published on Christmas day, so we’ll see if we can do something festive for the holiday.
Thanks for reading my meta article! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.
Today’s article is just going to be a short article about my Lubuntu (and by extension Ubuntu) membership status. It’s only a news/meta article and you can safely skip it. Or you can read on… I don’t mind… It’s just some news.
For starters, you can see when I first joined the Lubuntu team originally:
What I do, more often than not, is do the live testing for the daily .iso. It’s tedious work, but I enjoy the challenge and have the time. You might want to read:
Now, I do my testing with Lubuntu. I’m also an Ubuntu Member. This is because I have to be an Ubuntu Member to be a Lubuntu Member. If you’re an official member of some of the more recent flavors, that’s no longer true. You can be an official member without official Ubuntu membership.
Membership lasts a a year. My year was up and I submitted a renewal application. I was once again accepted as an official member.
So, I’m an official Lubuntu (and Ubuntu) Member for another year. Yay!
I’d like to take a moment to invite others to join in helping out their favorite distro. You don’t have to dedicate all your time to it. You don’t have to be a programmer. If you want, you can get involved – and make an appreciable difference.
So, thus ends this article. I need an easy day once in a while, and now you know my membership status has been renewed. Enjoy the easy day!
Today’s article is yet another meta article, in which I discuss the state of Linux-Tips. It’s basically an easy day for me and an article that lets you know how the site is progressing. It’s generally an easy article to write and I appreciate that.
This is a pretty long article. Longer than most. I do encourage folks to read it all, but I doubt that’ll change anything. 🙂
As folks may know, I pay a lot of attention to the site’s statistics and those statistics influence how I do things. I try to optimize the site, as best as I can, for the viewer. For example, the day this article will be published is on a Saturday. That’s the day I consistently get the least amount of traffic. So, that’s the day I’ll cover the state of Linux tips.
I’ve actually been wanting to write this article for a while. I’m really excited about some of the changes going on, especially now that Google has taken me out of the dog house for accepting a paid article. Yes, Google, I learned a lesson!
While you might not like that I optimize for Google, that’s where I get the majority of my traffic. I don’t get squat from other search engines, but Google loves my site! For a blog, I’m doing VERY WELL in the traffic growth department. We’ll give you some details below.
So, let’s just jump into the meta stuff and see where that goes.
The State Of Linux-Tips #11:
Let’s just get this started by sharing this:
Oh my! The site’s traffic is increasing rapidly. For example, in the past 28 days (the easiest stats for this), the site has shown up in 227,000 searches. Out of all those, nearly 4,000 people have clicked on those search results and visited Linux-Tips! (That’s actually a good percentage.)
Last month, the month of September, was the first time I’ve exceeded 10 GB of traffic. Now, the site’s mostly text with almost no images and almost no videos. That’s a lot of traffic, and it took over 9,000 unique visitors to reach that level.
To put that into some contrast, in January of this year I had a total of 6,400 unique visitors.
Also, in May I hit 7,800 visitors – but then Google threw me into the doghouse for the paid article. In June and July, I got about 7,200 unique visitors. In September, those visitors would visit 14,900 times! It’s amazing how fast the site is growing now that it’s out of the doghouse.
I should also mention that I was getting, in the previous 28 days as a running total, no more than 3,200 visits from Google. In less than the past month, that running total is what is represented by the 4,000 clicks mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. Google considers this a ‘high traffic site’.
Previously, the ScreenFetch vs Neofetch was the most popular article, and today it continues to get the most search results. Direct visits can sometimes outnumber that, so that’s why the stat might look a little weird.
I still use a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is that it means the site loads faster for people around the globe. When you load the site, you’re getting a cached result from a server somewhere near you, instead of needing to access my server directly.
The CDN recently stopped a DDoS attack. There was a CDN free tier but I am no longer in a position where the site fits the free tier, so it costs me even more money. As far as I know, it’s only useful for WordPress sites that use LiteSpeed as the server. That fits this site, so I use it. It works brilliantly, but I now use enough traffic to also have to pay for the CDN service.
It’s worth every penny, given how the site didn’t stumble in the slightest during the attacks. So far, donations only add up to like $10 USD. I do appreciate them and put the money towards hosting and the CDN. There aren’t any other real expenses. Ad revenue does help.
They gave up not long after, or so that’s what it appears to be. Good… It wasn’t working.
The site’s busiest days are Tuesday through Thursday. I’m not sure why Monday isn’t all that busy? Maybe folks encounter the problem on Monday and finally find my site on Tuesday? I really don’t know. I do know that I get a lot of traffic from within corporate networks, so that’s professionals searching the site – or entertaining themselves while they should be working.
There really aren’t that many newsletter subscribers. I’m thinking about making it pop up a notice when people visit, but that seems like it might be annoying. On the other hand, it’d likely result in more folks subscribing. Do you find those newsletter popups annoying? Do you sometimes see them and decide to enter your email? I know I do, but I’m sympathetic to others running websites.
From watching the way people work through the site, few scroll down far enough to actually see the newsletter. Putting it at the top seems like a worse idea than a popup. If you have any thoughts on the matter, feel free to leave a comment. I could use some input.
Anyhow…
Closure:
As you can tell, I’m pretty happy about the growth. Not a whole lot of folks click ads, so the site really isn’t making much of anything for ad revenue, but it does make a little. Then again, money wasn’t really the point. I do want the site to at least break even, but I dunno if it’ll ever do that. That’s all I really care about. I don’t want to make money, I have enough. I do want the site to break even, just as a matter of principle.
Either way, this is the most excited I’ve ever been about a meta article. Things are going great, according to all the stats I keep. As for the stats, don’t worry, I couldn’t single anyone out if I tried. I don’t store any personal information because it just seems like the right thing to do. Your privacy is reasonably assured when you visit. I too value my online privacy – sometimes. Other times I’m an open book, but I like to pick when and where that happens!
Also, in case anyone is confused… I do store any information you give me. But, I only keep what I need to make the site work. I figure if I don’t store information, I can’t lose the information. I obviously store your email address if you sign up for the newsletter or register for the site. It’d be pretty hard for those things to function without that.
The rest of it is information I really don’t care about and don’t care to keep. If you give me your address so that I can send you something, you can be certain that I deleted it afterwards ’cause I don’t want to be in charge of securing that securely.
Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.
