There’s a built-in command line tool in every Mac called caffeinate that prevents your computer from going to sleep, even when the lid is closed. This is the default behaviour if an external monitor is attached, but if that’s not the case, MacBooks just go to sleep as soon as you close the lid. While … Read more
It’s never good if your server is working fine, but the domains that resolve to it are down for one reason or another. This has happened to me TWICE this year already, and both times it was out of my hands (yes @ENOM, I’m looking at you). Many of my clients use websites for data storage, … Read more
It’s easy to establish an FTP connection using the ftp command from the Linux Command Line. Sadly this command does not accept login credentials as parameters – which means that if we use it in a script, our script will pause and wait for us to type those credentials in manually. Not really suitable for … Read more
It’s not quite as easy to get up and running with Jekyll as the Quick Start Guide makes it sound. But it’s not super difficult either – if explained from one human to another. Here’s how I got Jekyll working on a vanilla CentOS 7 instance. Installing some necessary packages Before we can install Jekyll … Read more
I was racking my brains over how to mount an SD card formatted with anything other than FAT32 on my Android device. Jelly Bean and Kit Kat automatically mount FAT32 partitions, but they seem to ignore native Linux file systems – which Android clearly understands. Apparently there’s a $1.54 app on the Play Store that … Read more
I’ve just installed a LAMP stack on my Nook Tablet using Debian. However I’ve been using CentOS since 2008 and I’m so used to how things are done there that it was a bit of a culture shock doing relatively simple things “on the other side”. It’s like a country whose language you don’t speak … Read more
Usually the top command shows you how long a Linux system is up and running – but sadly not on OS X, or Darwin more specifically. There is however a command line tool with the descriptive name uptime which will tell you how long your Mac has been running, precisely the line that’s missing from … Read more
It’s often necessary to know what the exact type of CPU that’s installed on your system. For example, you may need to know if you’re dealing with a dual core or quad core system, or a 32/64 bit system. Only the CPU can tell you this. Here’s how to find out the string you need … Read more
