If you are like me, you have a lot of items that get repeated in e-mails websites and hint pages maybe even links you name it and unless you are really patient it can be a handful making macros in Thunderbird. Well today I found a handy little add-on to do just it makes Macros a simple task and gives you a choice of trigger devices from keyboard or mouse or even keywords. Here is what the homepage says about Quicktext;

What is Quicktext
Quicktext is an extension for Thunderbird that lets you create templates that can be easily inserted into your own emails. Using Thunderbird, Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails. Quicktext performs both simple and complex tasks. The program can insert different signatures into your emails depending on whom you are sending the email to. Take a look and see if it is not the quick tool you were wishing you had, Baldy

Go to the Quicktext Website

Okay this is a older article but it still is a great source of information for those who ask what is a firewall and how does it work. And should I spend money on a firewall or is a open source firewall just as good.

You’ve heard the familiar arguments: commercial firewall products are overpriced; proprietary firewall code leaves you at the mercy of a vendor’s timetable in the event of a security hole; the cost of underlying hardware/software platform for Windows is high and puts you on an escalating upgrade path. As your company’s key IT decision-maker you can’t afford to spend money needlessly nor ignore even temporary security issues, so you’re thinking seriously about deploying a Linux-based firewall solution. What do you need to know?

Network security is a broad topic, and while a good firewall is an essential part of network security, it does not work in isolation. A secure system also requires effective monitoring and intrusion detection, as well as a “respond and restore” plan in the event of a security breach. We’ll be restricting our discussion to firewalls, but keep in mind that your firewall plan must coexist with your other security measures.

In this article we’ll look at some of the decision considerations in selecting a Linux-based firewall, including both considerations specific to firewall technology and general considerations about understanding Linux-based and open source options.

Read the Entire Article

f you’ve dabbled even a little bit with security matters, you know that giving root rights or the root password to a common user is a bad idea. But what do you do if a user has a valid need to do something that absolutely requires root rights? The answer is simple: use sudo to grant the user the needed permissions without letting him have the root password, and limit access to a minimum.

With sudo (which stands for “superuser do”), you can delegate a limited set of administrative responsibilities to other users, who are strictly limited to the commands you allow them. sudo creates a thorough audit trail, so everything users do gets logged; if users somehow manage to do something they shouldn’t have, you’ll be able to detect it and apply the needed fixes. You can even configure sudo centrally, so its permissions apply to several hosts.

Read the Rest of the Article

File backups are a key element for every user and on every computer. Whether it be an office setting or a home desktop machine, backups are essential – your hard drive will fail at some point; you will need a backup, and you’ll be kicking yourself if you learn this lesson the hard way. Linux users have usually resorted to CRON and Rsync to manage their backups – until now. TimeVault finally offers a complete, easy-to-use, intuitive backup system for Linux.

Backing up in Linux is Finally Made Simple with TimeVault

With graphical user interfaces becoming more and more friendly and easy to use, new users of GNU/Linux and the BSDs can now get their daily work done without having to tinker around (very often) with a terminal. However, many users don’t like to use a GUI for every task, and find that they necessarily need to depend on some terminal, or shell. Sometimes, one has to log in to a remote machine, without a GUI. At other times, we just have to run a `console’ based application. Under such situations, there are several ways in which a utility like screen can be put to efficient use.

Yes this is really basic but remember you were a noob once too, Baldy

A dummies introduction to GNU Screen