How many bytes does it take to change a single byte in a file? Well, a simple patch program just needs to do several system calls to OS (to make the change and to print some output to the user). Such executable should never exceed a kilobyte, right? Right?
Well, it very much depends on your choice of the programming language…
My router runs on OpenWRT and to backup its configuration I simply run the following shell script from my laptop to get the configuration archive in a local directory.
This post is a continuation of my previous post about building a DOS PC. Today I want to give some theoretical overview of DOS, highlight some of its limitations and strong sides. Without the theoretical context many realities of the DOS era which were relevant to the technologies of the past might seem weird today, so I decided to write a dedicated post for the theory before sharing any practical advice.
In this post I would like to describe my experience of building a retro DOS PC in 2023. I’ll explain my motivation for doing that and share some observations for those of you who might be interested in making such build yourself.
In this article we consider a hypothetical social security system which could exist in some imaginary country. Though I used some scraps of knowledge about the real social security system as an inspiration to illustrate this post - this article, the code snippets in it and conclusions should never be used as a source of information about the real social security benefits. Please use official websites to get the actual information on this topic or about any similar programs in your country.
Here are my headphones for going outside:
Couple of weeks ago during my normal night I suddenly caught myself thinking about how cool it would be if instead of an article on the web I was reading a normal book and my eyes would feel less tired (so that I had more resources to sit behind the screen later).
Then I suddenly had an idea what if my laptop had an e-ink display, would I be able to write code and texts on it, without stressing my eyes too much? The minimalistic command-line environment which I use should truly shine on the device with physical limitations. Also energy-efficiency and eco-friendliness of such device (cyberdeck) should be at the top. So I started my research.
I manage my bookmarks in a UNIX way, independently from any browser in a simple text file.
Today I would like to describe two things. Encryption of the home directory in
Linux using eCryptfs and how you can make incremental backups of your
home directory to the cloud and sync it between different computers in a
secure manner using CLI tool duplicity.