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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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

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)

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 …

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 …