Let’s begin with something useful.

In order to use Tor, you ideally need a browser that can access it. The Tor Browser on desktop platforms, formerly known as the Tor Browser Bundle, and the Orfox Browser with the Orbot app on Android are the suggested browsers. Why? Tor takes anonymity seriously.

The four log entries below are from 4 browsers that are using Tor.

Brave: 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Nov/2018:12:56:19 +0000] “GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1” 404 209 “http://irvdwucxcq6kb2nm.onion/" “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36”

We’ll do this in four parts for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android users.

Windows

1. Go to: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
2. Download the latest version for Windows
3. Run the installer
4. You will now see a new folder on your Desktop. Open that and run Tor Browser.
5. Click Connect
6. Congrats, you are on Tor!
7. Go to https://check.torproject.org/ in the Tor Browser

Linux

1. Go to: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
2. Download the latest version for Linux
3. Open a command line
4. Unzip the application. Replace xxxxxx with the current version that you downloaded

tar -xvJf tor-browser-linux64-xxxxxx.tar.xz

I’m staying in a hotel chain in London only to find a firewall that throttles interesting stuff like BBC iPlayer and YouTube. I tried going to my VPN provider. That the website is blocked to protect children and vulnerable people. What?! Meanwhile I have no trouble connecting to #4chan because they only care so much about children_._

Of course Tor is blocked also, well for other people, I got it to work anyway and now I’m writing this using it out of spite.

I used Fedora 28 today for work instead of my usual OpenSUSE Leap 15 installation. Here’s how it went.

My setup:

• Intel© Core™ i7-4500U CPU @ 1.80GHz × 2
• 16GB Ram
• 250G SSD

Here’s the software that I needed for work today:

• Synergy
• LibreOffice > 6.0
• Chromium Browser
• Spotify
• NFS
• virt-manager
• Graphical multi-tab text editor
• Tilix
• Pidgin
• Hexchat
• KeepassXC

I use Synergy as a virtual KVM between my home server machine that handles my storage, email, etc. and this brings us our first real problems. The “software” application in Gnome doesn’t list Synergy even when I search for it and I was wondering if I would have to go download the RPM it’s creator (I have a valid license so that’s not really a problem). I ran ‘dnf search synergy’ and there it was. If your software installation tool only covers “best of” software but not everything then it’s usefulness is only marginal at best.

A few years ago I wrote this rousing email about the Linux Documentation Project and I made waves in a mailing list that lay mostly dormant for years. After the list was rejuvenated, I set out to learn git, then then to find pieces of Linux documentation all around the web and add it. The idea was, find a central place (i.e. TLDP) to store all of the documentation from here and there and then replicate that central store all over the globe for redundancy so it is never lost. I had big goals and then nothing really came of it.

This video is a little kludgy.  It was literally my first time putting together the cluster and if you notice at the end, it doesn’t actually work. None of the worker nodes are actually usable. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

linux-3q2c:~ # kubectl get nodes NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION linux-3q2c NotReady master 3m v1.11.1 linux-fykp NotReady 1m v1.11.1 linux-gbv8 NotReady 51s v1.11.1

In the meantime, thanks to this post, I’ve reinstalled with cri-o and now have a fully functional cluster.

I picked up a new toy this week to replace my aging and rarely-used Raspberry Pi 3 (original). It came with Windows 10 already on it and I immediate went to the forums for a howto on installing Linux. There is a guide on how to install Ubuntu 16.04 but it seems to require a lot of extra steps (special kernel, etc).  I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it with OpenSUSE. At worst it would fail and I would be left with Ubuntu.

Here’s the webpage for a very early edition of Huckleberry Finn. If you open the PDF using a modern PC or tablet, it will look fine though a little slow to load. If you open it on your Kindle, Nook Color, or some other older Ebook reader that displays PDFs, you’re in for a shock.

[gallery ids=“927,928,926” type=“rectangular”]

Each page in these PDFs are actually 3 images. When put together by a modern PDF reader, they make one nice scanned PDF page. If you’re not suing a modern reader, you see all 3 layers separately. This makes the book unreadable. Even if you are using a modern reader, these PDFs have a noticeable lag time compared to other documents because it is loading 3 images per page.

Introduction

LXC (Linux Containers) are whole-system containers. They are meant to be able to do just about anything you can do with a VM with a percentage of the system resources and and a tiny startup time.

During Installation:

During installation, you can pretty much choose defaults for everything except you will need to create two additional btrfs subvolumes and if you gave your VM more than 30G of space, you will need to specify that manually because the installer will only recognize 30G by default.

Introduction: Installing Saltstack

The great thing about being able to spin up several new system containers running multiple Linux distros is that you get to experiment with software like Saltstack without the hassle of creating multiple VM’s. This can be especially daunting on a machine that is lacking resources.

The following directions are how I installed Salt on multiple containers running at the same time but using less that 2G of RAM total for testing. Saltstack easily controlled all of their very different package manager and system configurations effortlessly.