Newer versions of Linux Mint use MintX as the default login screen greeter. By default it comes with a predefined collection of images that display in the background that change periodically in a slide show type format. The default images are great but I wanted to add a personal touch…
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Raspberry Pi 2 Bitcoin Node
Not long ago I setup up a Bitcoin node on a Debian Wheezy VPS to teach myself about Bitcoin and the blockchain in general. It was a great learning experience but the memory requirements of the Bitcoin software kept causing my VPS instance to run out of memory so the…
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Running a Bitcoin Node on Debian Wheezy
Over the last few years I have keenly followed the rise of Bitcoin from its early days trading at around $8USD. I watched with interest when it made its sharp rise to $1200USD and then felt a bit of dismay with more recent decline back to around the $200USD mark.…
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Android Debug Bridge Tricks
Over the last couple of months I have been doing a lot of work with Cordova and the Ionic Framework creating my field guide of NSW Marine Life for the Android platform. When I started out working with Android my work flow was pretty simple: Make the required changes to…
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Simple Iptables Blacklist
Anyone that has run a server for any length of time quickly learns that the Internet is full of spammers, bots and other characters you would prefer didn’t exist. A firewall is key to keeping these guys out and Linux comes with a Kernel level firewall called iptables that can…
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Creating a Tor Relay on Debian
The TOR project has proven itself an important tool in the fight to protect the anonymity of people online. The project obviously needs servers to route traffic through for the project to achieve its goals though. So contributors are needed to donate relays nodes ensuring a free Internet for all.…
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PHP FPM Errors After Upgrade
Recently I noticed a few of my servers had stopped serving my sites, with 502 errors being to visitors. I took a look at my site logs and noticed that they were full of the “Permission Denied” errors below: 2014/06/09 09:45:17 [crit] 11453#0: *22 connect() to unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock failed (13: Permission…
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Quick Intro To Memcached Stats
A few days ago I was given the job of changing the caching engine used in a Zend Framework based application from a simple flat file system based caching system to a memcached based object store that could be used by multiple servers. After extending the existing application bootstrap file…
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PNG Crush: PNG image optimisation script
Building a Cordova based mobile application recently at work we were facing an issue with an application size that was literally growing by the day. The project leveraged a lot of PNG templates sent to us by the design department and these template files were contributing about 50mb to the…
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Linux CLI: File Text Search & Replace
Occasionally you need to change the contents of some files easily to save a lot of manual work. In my case it was a server migration, the old IP address of a server was referred to from numerous DNS records. This meant the contents of a couple of hundred Bind…
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