Emacs Macros and Keybindings
Usually, for quick hacks, its easier to define a keyboard macro in Emacs than create a custom Emacs Lisp function. If you want that macro to persist and be easily usable via a key binding, the usual advice is to do something like: (defalias 'seach-and-replace (kmacro "M-x replace-string C-m misspeling C-m misspelling")) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-f") 'search-and-replace) That does work, but it can end up polluting your .emacs file with a bunch of extra lines and, given the global nature of Emacs Lisp variables, provides an opportunity for a name collision.
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Tags: emacs emacs lisp
A Real Life Disaster Recovery Event
I’ve participated in many Disaster Recovery (“DR”) planning events over the years, and I generally was left with the impression that, whether the exercise was successful1 or not, the people running the exercise were never really left with an understanding of what recovery would look like, or how complete the recovery would be. Fortunately, I only ever had to assist one company in recovery from a real disaster (more fortunately, I guess, it wasn’t my employer.
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Dialup ISP Archaeology
I sometimes see questions on Hacker News or other forums that are asking how early dialup ISPs worked (or some specific aspect thereof,) so I thought I’d write up what these systems were like. I worked at such an ISP from 1996 - 2006 and we acquired several others during that time, so I got to see a few different approaches. The Bare Minimum Roughly before 1996, most of our users dialed into our service using an analog modem (usually 14.
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Using a Yubikey and GPG for SSH authentication
Overview I wanted a way to secure my SSH private key on a hardware token, so I configured a Yubikey to store the key. This is an overview of the the steps I took to do this. Install required software GPG If you don’t already have GPG installed, you can get it from https://gnupg.org or install it via your favorite package manager. To install it via Homebrew: $ brew install gpg2 Pinentry (for Mac) We’ll also want to install a suitable pinentry program to use when authenticating to a remote server.
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Tags: yubikey gpg ssh linux macos
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