Absurd: tutorial

20090719   Building your own Slackware Distribution   ⇢  

Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and SuSE have system for making respins. Slackware's package manager has an easy to use makepkg script, and the installer is wickedly easy to customize to meet your needs. So, let's go through making a Slackware-based distribution.

20101015   Manual Backups with dd   ⇢  

There are several different ways to make backups of data for any operating system. In the "glory days" of UNIX people would usually write a cron job that would create a Tape ARchive of their system and write that TAR to a tape drive. Well, those days are

20110106   An Introduction to Mutt   ⇢  

It seems as though every time someone sees me at my desk reading my mail, they ask what it is I am doing. I tell them I am reading my mail, and they're shocked. They see me pull up image attachments, and office and all this, and they think I am some kind

20110420   An Introduction to VIm   ⇢  

A long time ago, in a college far far away, some nerds were playing with UNIX. At that time, UNIX shipped with ed. Some rather clever programmers made a replacement for ed called em. Em became en. En became ex. Ex is Vi. Why is this important? Understandi

20110822   An Introduction to Find   ⇢  

Learning find can seem daunting at first, but it is worth learning. There is no single more useful search tool for UNIX like systems. You could almost consider find a very primitive scripting language in itself as find can find the files you request and t

20111020   An Introduction to Slackware Linux   ⇢  

People often look at Slackware with a certain amount of trepidation. It appears complicated, difficult, or tedious. If you ever felt like trying Slackware but didn't because of those fears, this is an article for you. I am going to cover installation ste

20120613   An Introduction to C, I   ⇢  

C is a computer programming language that was designed for the purpose of implementing system software. Today, it is still used for that task but is also used for implementing application software. C is insanely widely used. C is the bedrock of UNIX, Linu

20120616   An Introduction to C, II   ⇢  

Last time, we got into the absolute basics. This time, let's cover something more useful.

20120626   An Introduction to C, III   ⇢  

So, in this installment, let's talk about loops. So far, all you have had is sequences. Programs only consist of sequence, loop, selection, and data. Looking at it this way, you're nearly ready to call yourself a programmer. So, don't get discouraged.

20160705   An Introduction to C, IV   ⇢  

Programs are a lot more useful if users can interact with them. It is equally useful to be able to perform specific operations depending upon what input is gained from said users. That's the topic for this entry.

20120710   An Introduction to C, V   ⇢  

As you might imagine, a large series of conditional statements could get really tedious. Imagine a series of 20 if statements... and imagine typing that out. Very quickly, it would become very annoying. For this reason, C has the switch-break.

20120728   An Introduction to C, VI   ⇢  

Now for something odd.

20120815   An Introduction to C, VII   ⇢  

So far, I have thrown a lot of information at you very quickly. Let's recap with completely useless programs.

20120830   An Introduction to C, VIII   ⇢  

So far, we have already covered the use of the character data type, but what happens when you want to print more than one character to screen? This was strings are for.

20120910   An Introduction to C, IX   ⇢  

In the last post, I briefly introduced arrays and strings. Let's look a little more closely.

20130122   An Introduction to C, X   ⇢  

It's time for a cake walk. Here's an array of integers.

20150610   An Introduction to C, XI   ⇢  

Some time has passed since I last did anything with my C tutorial. This is largely due to work and having several different projects going at any one time (learning Chinese, developing a hobby OS, a gaming community, etc...). However, I felt that I ought

20150705   An Introduction to C, XII   ⇢  

So, in this part of the C Intro, I would like to say a bit about memory management.

20150823   An Introduction to C, XIII   ⇢  

We've covered a lot of ground with C so far. The big problem here is that we've not yet covered one of the most common tasks on a UNIX system. We have not covered files. So, let's look at files. For file I/O in C, you need a file pointer. We declare a fi

20190215   Linux Kernel 4.19   ⇢  

For those individuals using Linux distributions that ship with older kernels, they may find themselves needing a newer kernel for hardware support, and not having a package available. Never fear. In this document, I will be using 4.19.21, but you will wan

20200504   Setup WordPress Yourself   ⇢  

This article assumes the reader has some basic familiarity with the Linux operating system, and it assumes that either Linux or Windows with WSL is in use on the reader's computer.

20201028   Slackware Current   ⇢  

Slackware Current usage isn't really explained anywhere, but it's somewhat

20201104   Multi-account Mutt   ⇢  

Mutt is a mail user agent. It's an old one. It doesn't have a GUI.

20211004   Scalable on Bare Metal?   ⇢  

So, how do you actually setup a web service that isn't bound by the performance of single machine? Like... how do you really do it? Not with docker, not with the cloud, not with automation. How do you actually setup a webserver? It starts with knowing wha

20220312   Setting up a blog at home   ⇢  

So, you have a Raspberry Pi or an extra computer, and you're thinking you'd like to setup a blog on it. Then you realize, that your broadband connection may not have a static IP address. It's okay. You can do it all. It is important to note that while you

20220414   Hosting @ 127.0.0.1 with Argo Tunnels   ⇢  

I have in the past covered both setting up and hosting WordPress on your own, and I have covered hosting from home. Now, let's do something a little more interesting. Hosting at home can be a less than pleasing experience. You may need a DynDNS service. Y

20221105   Vaultwarden on an RPi   ⇢  

So, there are plenty of reasons to self-host your password manager, and very few reasons not to do so. In my own case, there were essentially zero reasons not to run my own password manager as I had the hardware available, and I have a domain over at Clou

20230310   An Introduction to Linux   ⇢  

In the 1990s, Linux was available on store shelves in big boxes. These were complete with thick manuals covering a wide variety of the software included in a given Linux distribution. After the dot com bust, this practice largely stopped. Many Linux distr

20231025   Kernel 6.5   ⇢  

It will come as little surprise to long time readers of either of my sites that

20231203   How to Block LLM bots   ⇢  

With all of the various LLMs and LLM-using-services springing up all over the web without any regard at all to copyright, morality, or consent, I wanted to find a way of blocking these things from using any of my content. Normally, we would use `robots.tx

20231205   Running an LLM locally   ⇢  

So, if you want to run an LLM locally for whatever reason, it's not too hard to do. Essentially, you first need to grab Llama.cpp, compile it, then grab a model (and possibly convert it), and then run it. Before starting, make sure you have a C/C++ compil

20240820   A Notepad in a Browser Tab   ⇢  

For some reason, I've always really enjoyed having a tiny non-persistent scratchpad in a browser tab. Just seems useful. This is despite having a clipboard tool, text editors, and a bunch of other tools available in KDE at all times.

20240923   Linux Kernel 6.11, Huge Config   ⇢  

In Slackware Current, the team has removed the huge kernel. That's fine, but I have not given up on that style of kernel. If you want to recreate that config for yourself, here's how.

20251108   Zero to Hosted, Part 1   ⇢  

Getting a website online isn't difficult, and it doesn't require much. What you need:

20251126   Zero to Hosted, Part 2   ⇢  

In Part 1, we looked at just getting a site up on a local network. How do you get the site online? First, you need a domain name. There are plenty of registrars from who

20251127   Zero to Hosted, Part 3   ⇢  

So, by now, if you've followed Part 1 and Part 2, you should have a website that is