Encrypted Duplicity Backup to European Amazon S3 Bucket

Posted on Sun 05 November 2017 in tech • Tagged with linux, ubuntu, aws, s3

This post documents how to configure AWS S3 and duplicity to do encrypted backups to the cloud.


Continue reading

Manually starting ssh-agent to use it in a (remote) terminal session

Posted on Thu 22 June 2017 in misc • Tagged with linux, ssh

ssh-agent can be used to unlock an ssh private key and therefore prevent having to enter the password multiple times. Usually your desktop environment does this for you. But if you're for example sshing into your workstation and then use ssh (e.g. for git or hg) your desktop environment …


Continue reading

IntelliJ Idea application menu entry for xubuntu

Posted on Thu 25 May 2017 in tech • Tagged with xubuntu, linux

Assuming intellij has been installed to /opt/ here's how to create an application menu entry (on xubuntu). Create a file ~/.local/share/applications/intellij.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=IntelliJ
Icon=/opt/jetbrains/idea/bin/idea.png
Exec=/opt/jetbrains/idea/bin …

Continue reading

Extend a VirtualBox guest harddisk

Posted on Tue 18 April 2017 in tech • Tagged with windows, linux

I use VirtualBox for the rare cases when I need a Windows OS. The latest Win10 updates failed to install because there's not enough disk space. Apparently 30GB is not enough for a whole OS and office... ;-(

Luckily that's easy to fix:

  • Shutdown the guest
  • Make sure there are no …

Continue reading

Cups printers do not show up in Firefox (Arch)

Posted on Mon 02 January 2017 in tech • Tagged with arch, linux

If your CUPS printers do not show up in the Firefox printing dialog (but they do for example in Google Chrome) you may be missing the following package: gtk3-print-backends. Installing this solved that very annoying problem for me.


USB Keyboard not working at boot (between GRUB and disk decryption)

Posted on Sun 18 December 2016 in tech • Tagged with arch, linux

On my thinkpad I have an encrypted Arch installation setup similarly to my chromebook setup. Since I bought my a new wireless usb keyboard this thing never worked for decrypting the system. It perfectly works once Arch has started up, but for entering the password at boot I had to …


Continue reading

Encrypted Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Installation (RAID, LLVM, LUKS)

Posted on Thu 07 April 2016 in tech • Tagged with linux, ubuntu

Google drive notes I took when setting up my encrypted Ubuntu 14.04 LTS home server (RAID, LLVM and LUKS).


Continue reading

Downloading a website for reading offline

Posted on Tue 28 July 2015 in tech • Tagged with linux, wget, university

I needed a way to download all papers and exercises of one of my lectures. Here's a good wget snippet to mirror the website:

wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites -np -nH -N --cut-dirs=1 http://www.ita.inf.ethz.ch/alscpr15/

Source: Tweet by @doublec (tweets are protected now)


Arch Linux on Toshiba CB30-102 (Chromebook)

Posted on Sun 21 June 2015 in tech • Tagged with arch, chromebook, linux

The Beginners guide in the wiki is straightforward. Here are just some additional notes on setting up Arch Linux on my chromebook.

Planned setup

My device has a 16GB ssd. I'm planning to wipe ChromeOS and partition the disk into two partitions: 2GB /boot (ext4) and a 14GB encrypted partition …


Continue reading

Move/Copy mails between different IMAP accounts

Posted on Sat 15 November 2014 in tech • Tagged with osx, linux, imap, gmail

I decided to switch back to Gmail/Inbox by Gmail. Copying thousands of mails in Thunderbird is a pain and after a couple of unsuccessful tries I started to search a better working alternative. mutt to the rescue!

# login to your old imap account:
mutt -f imaps://username@oldmailserver/INBOX …

Continue reading