I have been using Digital Ocean tutorials and documentation a lot lately. They have some great tech tutorials, tips and resources:

Tutorials | DigitalOcean

Follow along with one of our 8,000+ development and sysadmin tutorials.

Checked some of my notes from a few years ago and one of them had a reference and link to a Digital Ocean tutorial on SSH. Looked up several topics today, including MySQL.

The Dell Latitude E5540 with Intel i5 fourth generation processor is a fine laptop... if it's been upgraded with an SSD and 16GB memory (RAM). I'm refurbishing one today at the request of a customer who wanted a laptop for a friend with features that matched this model.

The person who requested Ubuntu 24.04 ended up going with Linux Mint Debian Edition, but not after me trying for an hour to get their Brother MFC-J825DW to work on Ubuntu. Brother's Linux installers are great, but Ubuntu must have done something different in the latest version to break it. Never could get the scanner working in Ubuntu. The Brother installer (downloaded from their website) worked just fine on Linux Mint Debian Edition. Note that you have to log out and back in again after the installer is run before the scanner will be recognized and work. Another win for Linux Mint and their LMDE version. View quoted note →

Good morning.

Living the good life. I'm a selling two refurbished computers (an HP laptop and HP mini PC desktop) with Linux today. One person requested ubuntu 24.04 LTS and the other person requested the most recent version of Linux Mint. #Linux #Business

AM4 socket and platform is one of my favorites. The longevity of support from AMD has been great. I plan to continue building AM4 based systems for a long time to come, even though AM5 has already been out for two years now. View quoted note →

I replaced the palm rest on a ThinkPad T520 laptop today. The left button on the trackpad wasn't working to the satisfaction of the customer, so she wanted it replaced. Done and tested. All good. #ThinkPad #repair

The clonezilla liveboot also has the "shred" utility, so you can boot clonezilla, enter a command prompt and run the same thing. View quoted note →

I am securely erasing a hard drive in a computer that a customer recycled with me: sudo shred -v -n 1 --random-source=/dev/urandom -z /dev/sda Did a live boot to Linux Mint and then ran that command to overwrite the data on the drive, securely erasing it. #Linux

I used CloneZilla a lot yesterday to copy disks. It is one way to get around the limitations of the Windows 11 installer. I am no fan of Microsoft Windows, but most of my customers still prefer or need it for the work they do. I let people know there's the option of Linux, at least. If you have an installation of Windows 11 where you have already set up a local account and removed the Microsoft account, you can clone the disk to an image or to another disk (computer). This allows you to have Windows 11 on a computer with hardware "less" than what the Windows 11 installer requires. So clonezilla and similar tools are quite useful when repairing and refurbishing computers. #linux #clonezilla #Microsoft #Windows

Good morning

Having some sysadmin fun with overlay networks and reverse proxies! #linux #sysadmin

I just got another 1U Dell PowerEdge server, used of course. Looking forward to experimenting with what it can do.

On this laptop, I also used the Mint Themes installation script by @e33io https://git.sr.ht/~e33io/scripts/tree/main/item/install-mint-themes.sh View quoted note →

I installed Devuan Linux on an HP EliteBook 850 G1 laptop. Cinnamon desktop environment. One program that I like to have on laptops is Power Statistics, which shows the energy capacity of the laptop battery. It wasn't installed, so: sudo apt install gnome-power-manager

True. But if powered off, it will give limited info about location. But as soon as you turn it on and connect to the network again, your location will be logged. View quoted note →

The PDF guides for LibreOffice are excellent. View quoted note →

Use encryption

If your seed phrase is ever on screen, Microsoft could have access to a screenshot of it. View quoted note →

Yes. You can gain a surprising amount of freedom with little money if you act in a way that is consistent with freedom. Money sure can help get you there faster, though. View quoted note →