What It Means To Volunteer

Today, I want to talk about what it means to volunteer. I’m going to try to keep this brief and to the point. While I generally avoid vulgarities, there’s going to be some swearing in this article – unless I edit it out later and forget to remove this sentence. It could happen…

I’m also not going to publish this immediately. I don’t want to ruffle feathers and I don’t want there to be any fallout beyond me having said my piece, while also holding my tongue.

Some backstory…

Due to another project’s use of some software, we were forced to make a change to that software. That change adds friction to a subset of new users and a subset of people who need support. You know, at the exact time you don’t want there to be friction.

There was a better solution available, but people complained about the time the solution would take. It was a clearly better solution and yes it’d take some time and a commitment to that time in the future.

When proposing that we discuss this better solution, it was thrown in my face (and I’ll be careful to not be verbatim) that, “We’re all volunteers and I don’t want to spend my time this way.”

Another amusing comment was, “Our time can be better used to make the project better.”

Bitch, please… I put in more volunteer hours than any of them and there’s no better way to make the project better than to ensure people are able to easily access the product’s support! If we don’t have new users, we stagnate. If we can’t help people who are having problems, we lose users.

This is the very basic foundation  you need to make a good product. Without that foundation, you don’t have a product, you have a few people making a personal project for themselves.

What It Means To Be A Volunteer:

I am still angry and disappointed as I write this. Well, I’m mostly disappointed. That disappointment is a bit abstract. I’m disappointed that they’d add friction to a process that should be as easy as possible – and I’m disappointed that they’d hide behind their ‘volunteer’ status.

If you volunteer on a farm, you agree to shovel shit.

If you volunteer on a farm, you don’t just get to pet the animals.

In this case, the solution available is to “simply” package a flavor-specific package. This would take some time – though the person did brag about being fast. It’d then take some time every time a new version of that package was released. (Updates are seldom, as the project is quite mature.)

Another option was for them to use a different application, rather than using the same application and forcing the existing users to make things harder for users. There are many, many usable and mature applications in the category. 

So, yes, it’d require some time and work.

That’s what you volunteered for. That’s what you signed up for. When it gets tough, you don’t hide behind the word ‘volunteer’ like a coward. You step up and do what needs to be done. Using your volunteer status as an excuse for shitty work ethics isn’t acceptable behavior!

Closure:

I could go on, but that’d just be me ranting. At the end of the day, they’re going to do whatever it is they want to do and justify their shitty behavior by telling themselves and others that they’re a volunteer.

Worse, they throw the word volunteer out there like it’s some vaunted position in the community. It’s not… We’re all volunteers and I guarantee that I give more time to the Linux community than they do. They throw the term out there like they know best, when they’re ignoring the very elements that make our project a product. (Don’t get hung up on the word ‘product’, as a distro/flavor is indeed a product that people use to get real world work done.)

They ignored the bit about making it harder for those who should have it the easiest. They basically said ‘let them eat cake’, and we all know how that ended up. Except, it’s unlikely we’ll have a revolution with beheading – and indeed that’d be a bit much. Instead, we’ll bleed users at a slow but predictable rate and people will pretend it isn’t happening or that they don’t know why it’s happening.

It also doesn’t bode well for the many other decisions made by this person. They’re the head of a different project, one that’s fading into obscurity already. The death of a distro isn’t a sudden thing, unless they willfully make it so. It’ll be a slow demise, a shit-show of politics and mudslinging.

When it happens that their project dies, assuming I remember, I’ll return here and fill in some more of the details – because history should be complete. Until then, I’ll watch with morbid curiosity. The scent of shit is in the air.

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Remove A Swap File

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to remove a swap file. This isn’t something I recommend, for reasons I’ll explain, but I have no ethical qualms about telling you how to do so. After all, it’s your computer. You get to decide what it does!

There are some folks who will tell you that if you have enough RAM you don’t need swap. Well, I am not one of those people. I tend to have swap enabled regardless of how much RAM I have. I have a good reason and I’ll explain it to you as best as I can. I mean, the actual inner workings of the kernel are above my head, but I’ll explain it – or let other people explain it.

See, contrary to popular opinion, swap isn’t just a place the kernel sticks stuff when you’re running low on RAM. For example, check out the picture below:

swap in use with plenty of free RAM
As you can see, swap is used even with plenty of free RAM.

Here’s more information about the free command.

Now, do me a favor and go Google Linux and swap. You’ll find plenty of pages that briefly have this to say (and barely this to say):

Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full …

                                                                                                        That’s from MIT!

That’s only about half the story… There’s more to it, and that is kinda important.

Some More About Swap:

So, is it really that simple? Of course it isn’t! If it was really that simple, the intro to this would have been so much easier to write. No, it’s slightly more, a bit more, complicated than that. See, let’s quote a more thorough (and accurate) Linux.com:

Swapping is necessary for two important reasons. First, when the system requires more memory than is physically available, the kernel swaps out less used pages and gives memory to the current application (process) that needs the memory immediately. Second, a significant number of the pages used by an application during its startup phase may only be used for initialization and then never used again. The system can swap out those pages and free the memory for other applications or even for the disk cache.

                                                                                                     –Emphasis Mine.

What can we take from that? Well, it’s not just a place where the kernel stuffs things when there’s no RAM left – it’s also a place the kernel sticks things to avoid wasting RAM. This is very different than swap is just a place where the kernel stuffs things when RAM is low. It avoids using some RAM that’s best used elsewhere. That seems kinda valuable and important to me. Again, the inner workings of the kernel are pretty much witchcraft to me, but swap seems like a good thing to me.

The kernel is pretty smart about this, from what I’ve observed. It’s good at its job. It’s better at its job than you are. It is better at its job than I am. I highly encourage you to use swap, saving your RAM for more useful things. With disk space as large as it is, you’re not going to miss a couple of gigabytes. Let the kernel do its job, managing RAM as best as it can. They’ve put thousands of hours into making the kernel smartly deal with RAM, there’s no reason to hobble it.

Of course, ain’t nobody gonna listen to me… So, with that said, I might just as well go ahead and tell you how to remove a swap file… You’re gonna do what you want anyhow!

Remove A Swap File:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. 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.

The first thing we’re going to do is verify that you actually have a swap file…

If that mentions a swap file, only calling it a ‘swapfile’ (a single word), then your next step is to turn your swap off.

Now, for your next step you will want to remove the swap information from fstab, so let’s go like this to do that:

Find the line that starts with /swapfile and delete the entire line. All of it. Leave nothing behind. If you screw this up, your next boot may be an interesting exercise. The line is probably longer than it looks unless you’re using a terminal in full screen! Be sure to remove all of it. It should end with a 0, actually a 0 and then a tab and another 0.

Be doubly sure to remove the full line and then save your work. Then save it with nano. To do that, just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. That’ll save it.

Finally, remove the swap file itself. That one is nice and easy, you just:

That should do it! If you’ve realized you’ve made a mistake and want to have a swap file, you can always add a swap file. (I’m pretty sure it should be ‘swapfile’, but the rest of the ‘net calls it ‘swap file’, so I’m going with the majority – even though the majority don’t even know what the damned thing does!)

Closure:

There you have it. You now know how to remove a swap file. If that’s what you want to do, you go right ahead and do it. Truth be told, assuming you’ve got enough RAM, it won’t necessarily break anything. You might not even notice it is gone. Still, I figure it’s better safe than sorry – and who am I to judge what the kernel wants?

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Who is, Simply whois

Today, we’re going to learn about whois. There’s not much to it, so it won’t be a very long article. Think of this article as some of the others, where it’s not so much about the tool (the tool is simple to use) it’s about making folks aware of the tool and the capability.

Have you ever wondered about a domain name? Maybe you want to see if it’s registered? Perhaps you want to see who has registered it? Maybe you’ve noticed they have great uptime and want to see the name servers so that you can deduce the hosting company? Perhaps you want to file an abuse report, or you just want to know who the owner is so that you can send them an email. Maybe you’re a stalker and just need to narrow it down a little! (I kid, please don’t stalk anyone.)

Well, you can do that and more with whois! Want to know when the domain name expires so that you can swoop in and steal it? Well, you might be able to do that with help from the handy whois command! You can at least see the expiration date. I tend to keep things registered well in advance, ’cause I’m forgetful and don’t want to lose a domain name.

Unfortunately, quite a bit of information in whois databases is intentionally wrong. Sometimes, the information is quite useless. Certain domains, like this one, have requirements – so I have to use my real name in the registration information (though they never actually check). Other domain names aren’t so particular and you can lie, use email forwarders for abuse complaints and contact info, and generally hide that sort of stuff from whois databases. Ah well…

So, who is whois?

whois:

You might just as well crack open a terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and something useful should happen.

With your terminal open, go ahead and install whois. It’s surely in your default repositories, so just install it like you’d install any other software. As is the tradition, I’ll show you how to do it in Ubuntu or any apt-using distro:

Now, all you need to know is:

You don’t need the http, nor the www, just use the domain name. For example, you can:

I should point out that that’s not really my phone number. You probably shouldn’t call it. If you somehow need my phone number, just ask in private and I’ll share it with you – assuming there’s justification for doing so. Also, please don’t stalk me.

Anyhow, you can see when the domain expires, tell that I use a CDN and which one I use, see when the domain was registered, find out who the registrar is, etc… You can learn quite a bit of information from just that one command. Combined with something like traceroute and you can learn a lot.

Closure:

Anyhow, now you know about ‘whois’ and a bit about what you can do with it. If you want to go digging around, you can learn quite a bit – even if the domain’s behind a privacy fence. There are other tools, like MTR and dig (which we haven’t covered).

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Let’s Shred A Partition

In today’s article, we’re going to shred a partition. What does that mean? It means we’re going to erase the data in a manner that makes it difficult for that data to be recovered. Notice that I didn’t say ‘impossible’? That’s because they’ve got some pretty sweet forensic tools out there and who knows what they can recover.

This will keep your deleted data safe from a common thief or dumpster diver. It’s also not a bad idea to just destroy the drive, perhaps after shredding it, just to be sure. If you’re the enemy of a powerful government, you probably shouldn’t keep data on hard drives unless you’ve secured them very well! This may not help those sorts of people.

The tool we’ll be using is actually called ‘shred’. It’s possibly installed by default, but it’ll be in your default repositories. The command defines itself as:

shred – overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it

It further describes itself as:

Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.

This is actually a pretty easy article and won’t take much time to go over. There’s just a couple of commands I wanted to cover, and we’ll  just showing you how to shred a partition. So, ‘snot all that complicated, nor all that involved. On with the show!

Shred A Partition:

Like many other articles on this site, we’re gonna need an open terminal. 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.

First, let’s make sure you have shred installed. Enter this command:

If you don’t have shred installed, you’ll need to install it using your package manager. If you are using apt, then it’d look like:

Once installed, you need to know which partition you want to shred. For that, you’ll possibly need the following:

Once you have identified the partition, such as ‘sdb2’, you can shred the partition. To do that, try this command:

We use the -v for verbose, so it shows us the progress. This command will do the default. It will overwrite the partition three times. You can change that value easily enough. To do so, use a command similar to:

The -n lets you pick the number of times it will shred the partition, that is overwrite it with data, and you can pick any number you want. So, change the ’10’ to whatever you want, but be aware that it can take quite a while.

That’s it, really. There’s more that you can do with shred, so check the man page. I’m only covering how to shred a partition in this article.

Closure:

There you have it, another article. This one tells you how to shred a partition. If that’s something you need to do, you now know how to do it. As I mentioned in the first section of this article, it’s not very complicated. It will take some time, so be sure to use the -v option and keep track of what’s going on.

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Let’s Disable Your Webcam

In today’s article, we’re going to show you how to disable your webcam. It’s something I’ve seen folks ask before, and something someone contacted me to ask about. While I don’t normally answer questions via email, it did seem like a good article to write.

I see this question, about how to disable your webcam, quite a lot. There are some ingenious solutions, from sliders you can stick to your laptop to just putting a piece of electrical tape over it. Some vendors have gotten in on it and include a sliding cover that you can use when the webcam is not in use.

If you’re that paranoid, you might want to look for a laptop (generally) that doesn’t have a webcam – but that can be hard to find these days. In some cases, they’ll have a red light that comes on when the webcam is in use. Of course, the truly paranoid don’t trust that. And the really, truly paranoid people know their coffee pot is spying on them!

Well, in today’s article we’re going to share how to disable your webcam. It won’t be all that difficult. It’s something a beginner could do, if they can follow directions, because we’ll be using nano. So, anyone can do this…

NOTE: I only tested this with Lubuntu. That means it should work with any Ubuntu flavor and with any derivatives of Ubuntu. It should also work up-stream and in most distros, but I can’t say that those have been tested.

Disable Your Webcam:

Like many articles, this one requires an open terminal. 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.

Once you have the terminal open, enter the following command:

Now, copy/paste (or type yourself) the following into that file:

The first line, the line starting with a # sign, is a ‘comment’, meaning that it’s there for you, the reader, and won’t be interpreted by the computer as an input or a command of any kind. This is pretty common and traditional. You can change that text to anything you’d like. Something short and descriptive is probably best.

Now, you’ve gotta save it. It’s nano, so it’s actually not that hard but might confuse some folks. After all, it could seem hard if you’ve never done it before, but this is how you save it with nano. You just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER Bob’s your uncle! It’ll save the file and close nano for you.

Finally, you need to reboot for the changes to take effect. The effect is permanent, more or less. If you want to undo it permanently, then just reverse the process from above. If you want to disable it temporarily, you can try this and it should work for you:

That should do it! Though you’d still have a non-working webcam the next time you rebooted your computer. If you’re going to take the time to disable your webcam, you probably want that behavior anyhow. Again, if you disable your webcam and want to truly reverse it, just remove the lines like I mentioned.

Closure:

I don’t really want to encourage people, but I won’t be terribly rude if you email me with a question. Just, you know, know that I have other things going on in my life and that I don’t actually have all the answers. I write about the things I know, the things in my notes, or the things that spring to mind when I am late with scheduling another article. Ah well, now you know how to disable your webcam.

On the other hand, you can feel free to email me questions you think I might be able to answer (Keep ’em simple!) that might make good articles. I could use your question as a bit of an intro fluffing device and then do a “Reader’s Questions” kinda thing. There’s a big difference between emailing me for support and emailing me with a question that might make a good article. There’s no pressure in the latter case, as there is no time constraints or expectations. So, feel free to do that – just don’t expect me to respond with a solution, and there might be an article that comes from it.

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