tl;dr: Make these changes In your .bashrc add: HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups HISTIGNORE=”&:ls:[bf]g:exit:pwd:clear” shopt -s histappend And add the following cronjob: T=$(mktemp); tac "$HOME/.bash_history" | awk '!x[$0]++' | tac > "$T" && mv "$T" "$HOME/.bash_history" Using the duplicate lines in your history There’s an old Unix meme to share your most frequently used commands by issuing the following command:

Yesterday I fixed an eight-year-old security bug in my bespoke password vault. After a user logs in, the server issues a new Cookie for them. It’s sure to restrict itself with Morsels like domain and max-age. The Python code looks like this: my_cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie() my_cookie['sess'] = data() my_cookie['sess']['max-age'] = 30*60 my_cookie['sess']['domain'] =…

With Google+ going away, I made backups of both my LiveJournal and my Google+ accounts. Here’s why I love the backups: User Experience They’re super fast. Just static HTML5 (except for the search functionality), no frameworks, no libraries. You can navigate from the keyboard. Either the arrow keys, gaming WASD keys, or…

Or, My most egregious one-liner ever — Some of my cronjobs run on a shared hosting server where I don’t have access to /etc/logrotate or /var/log, so I can’t use logrotate to manage their logs. They write log lines to files in a log directory in my home directory. All I’ll ever want from these logs is…

tl;dr: Don’t delete user accounts without (always) notifying the user. I had an active eBay account, and was proud of my good reputation, curated by transactions from before 2004 to 2015. But then the account went idle in 2015, and I got an email that said, Unfortunately, since you haven’t…

I have a rarely-used email account for password resets and such. Since that’s all it’s for I don’t monitor it regularly, because it should only get email when I request the password reset myself. But then what if it gets email for another reason? I’d want to know. So I…

Do you really know what freedom means It’s a government 45 and an M-16 It’s 13 months in a jungle sopping wet It’s helping Vietnam celebrate Tet How deep in your pockets will you really reach to keep your precious Freedom of Speech You read the papers you watch the news You tell…

I came across a Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange question where I had the same question, but it was closed as off-topic. How to install Python 3.7 with SSL? The problem is that if you compile Python 3.7 on Raspbian Jessie, that Python won’t build the module _ssl. And since it…

I can log in to my home’s router from anywhere and configure the local network as needed, including stopping YouTube and Netflix when the kids need to do homework. I have a Raspberry Pi at home serving a website. My Internet Service Provider assigns my home’s IP address dynamically. So…