By Matt Fahrner, on February 13th, 2013 I’m writing this because I see so many people who use computers regularly who don’t know these basic keyboard shortcuts. They’re easy – learn them and your computer life will be much better. Most work on pretty much any GUI (Windows, Unix, even Mac substituting the CMD key for the CTRL key).
So with no further ado (hold down the CTRL key while typing the key that follows it, kind of like the SHIFT key):
- CTRL-C = copy the selected text
- CTRL-V = paste the prior copied text
- CTRL-X = copy the selected text and then delete it
- CTRL-Z = undo the last change
There are quite a few more worth learning, but some aren’t as guaranteed to work (for instance CTRL-SHIFT-Z which does a “redo” of the last “undo”). However, if you simply learn the 4 above your work will be remarkably improved in terms of streamlining.
As a final note, these DO NOT work in Unix command line (shell) windows. In fact you’ll get completely different and potentially ugly behavior. They will however work in the Unix GUI (X Windows and/or browser windows etc.).
By Matt Fahrner, on September 4th, 2012 If you use “iwconfig” on Linux to get statistics on your wireless LAN you’ll note that the “Signal Level” is expressed in negative decibels. On the surface that would appear confusing – how can decibels be negative?!
Fortunately an anonymous poster explains at Toms Hardware:
Absolute power of a signal is measured in wattage. The bel or decibel system can only describe relative power- a gain of 3 dB means your signal is 2 times as strong as it was before, but the dB scale doesn’t define where you’re starting from or what your ‘zero’ is. So, we specify dBm, indicating that our scale is relative to 1 milliWatt of power. 0 dBm = 1 mW.
The reason you see negative values is that you’re representing small but positive numbers, on a logarithmic scale. In logarithms, the value indicated represents an exponent… for example, under a log 10 scale, a value of -2 represents 10 to the -2 power, which equals 0.01. Likewise, a negative dBm means that you’re applying a negative exponent in your power calculations; 0 dBm equals 1 mW of power, so -10 dBm equates to 0.1 mW, -20 dBm equates to 0.01 mW, and so forth. It’s a lot easier, and more useful in some calculations, to describe a weak signal as -100 dBm as opposed to 0.0000000001 mW.
Pretty simple when it’s explained that way!
By Matt Fahrner, on July 12th, 2012 It seems lately I’m regularly having to dump the information from SSL certificates (for instance to get the “Subject” or CA signer). Since I keep having to look up the exact syntax, I thought it easier to save here and figured it might help others.
So, if in PEM format, use the following:
openssl x509 -text -in cert.pem
If in PKCS#12 format, use this:
openssl pkcs12 -info -in cert.pfx
To dump a CSR (Certificate Signing Request), use this:
openssl req -text -in request.csr
More can be found here and here.
By Matt Fahrner, on February 20th, 2012 If you’re using your Windows Media Player (WMP) as a Windows Media “server” to share your music library, yet don’t use WMP directly to manage your media (I use the much more rich MediaMonkey) then you may want to force a library rescan when you add new tracks to your file-store(s).
This isn’t very hard, . . . → Read More: Forcing a Window Media Player library rescan
By Matt Fahrner, on January 11th, 2012 Tracy Kitten at BankInfo has an interesting article about the Ramnit worm which is worthy of a read (even I would say by the general public). Ramnit is particularly pernicious because:
Ramnit’s man-in-the-middle looks like an actual social-media or bank-account sign-in page that captures a user’s ID and password, and sometimes other personal information en . . . → Read More: BankInfo Ramnit Article
By Matt Fahrner, on July 11th, 2011 In theory if the world were filled we universally good people, “bitly” and “TinyURL.com“, which given long URLs provide short ones, are a great idea. However whenever I get one I find that I’m frankly terrified to click on them.
Why?
Because while they could be going someplace useful, they could also be going to . . . → Read More: Why I hate tiny-fied URLs…
By Matt Fahrner, on April 2nd, 2011 To add ringtones (or notifications or alarms) to Android phones, connect the phone to your computer and go to the top level of the drive that is mounted. Under that drive you can create (though they may exist already):
/alarms or /media/alarms or /media/audio/alarms /notifications or /media/notifications or /media/audio/notifications /ringtones or /media/ringtones or . . . → Read More: Adding ringtones to Android
By Matt Fahrner, on March 28th, 2011 Two links from Intel are particularly useful for desktop/laptop users. First, this tool will find out if the Intel drivers you’re using are up-to-date:
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect
since many if not most desktops/laptops include some Intel based chipset (even if it isn’t the main CPU), then this is a pretty useful site to use.
If . . . → Read More: Useful Intel links…
By Matt Fahrner, on March 24th, 2011 This failure of the trusted Certificate Authority (CA) “Comodo”:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/24/fraudulent-certificates-issued-by-comodo-is-it-time-to-rethink-who-we-trust/
highlights something that is becoming more apparent:
SSL certificates probably aren’t worth the bits they’re printed on.
Forgetting that there is a fairly regular stream of issues with the authorities, companies like GoDaddy issue certificates for all of $12 with nearly . . . → Read More: SSL certs – probably not worth the bits they’re printed on…
By Matt Fahrner, on March 12th, 2011 If you get something like this in your Cisco’s IOS firewall log:
Mar 12 15:05:33 192.168.1.1 3129: 003121: *Mar 12 15:03:03.195 EST: %FW-4-TCP_OoO_SEG: Dropping TCP Segment: seq:525214740 1415 bytes is out-of-order; expected seq:525170856. Reason: TCP reassembly queue overflow – session 192.168.1.5:53022 to 208.79.250.63:80 on zone-pair ccp-zp-in-out class ccp-protocol-http
sometimes accompanied by hangs in . . . → Read More: Zone Firewall TCP reassembly size
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My Resume I've worked in professionally for a large discount retailer in the systems, networking, security, and programming arenas for the last 25+ years, much of it in leadership or management roles.
My resume is here.
More versions of it as well as more information in general, can be found here. Caveat Emptor The views expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent those of my employer, its officers, nor any other organization or individuals, whether connected by employment or any other association.
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