Ilin Tatabitovski itatabitovski

MacBook-friendly Ubuntu tweaks

I recently decided to switch from macOS BigSur 11.7.10 to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS after Apple decided to no longer provide updates for my MacBook Pro 11,1. During this transition I learned about various tweaks to improve user experience for MacBook users.

As a MacBook user you are probably used to keyboard shortcuts involving the ⌘ command key like ⌘ command+C and ⌘ command+V to copy/paste respectively. However, in Ubuntu pressing the ⌘ command key by default will open the Activities Overview which is similar to the Exposé view in macOS which is not what we want. As it turns out, Ubuntu involves the control key for almost all combinations you may be used to that involve the ⌘ command key in macOS. Luckily Ubuntu is quite configurable and we can tailor it to our needs.

Prerequisites

PostgreSQL is Enough

Background and Cron Jobs

Conventional Commit Messages

See how a minor change to your commit message style can make a difference.

git commit -m"<type>(<optional scope>): <description>" \
  -m"<optional body>" \
  -m"<optional footer>"

The instructions were tested on a Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th Gen (X1C5) on Arch Linux but should be applicable to other Lenovo models and Linux distributions.

BACKUP YOUR DATA! I created a bootable Ubuntu Image like this:

$ sudo sh -c 'curl --location --silent --fail "http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso" | pv > /dev/<your-usb-drive>'
# note that pv is only there to show progress, it is perfectly fine to redirect curl to the usb drive directly.

then I booted from this drive by pressing F12 on reboot and dumped my NVMe disk to an external hard drive like this:

OverEncrypt

This is a guide that I wrote to improve the default security of my website https://fortran.io , which has a certificate from LetsEncrypt. I'm choosing to improve HTTPS security and transparency without consideration for legacy browser support.

WARNING: if you mess up settings, lose your certificates, or decide to no longer maintain HTTPS certs, these steps can and will make your domain inaccessible.

I would recommend these steps only if you have a specific need for information security, privacy, and trust with your users, and/or maintain a separate secure.example.com domain which won't mess up your main site. If you've been thinking about hosting a site on Tor, then this might be a good option, too.

The best resources that I've found for explaining these steps are https://https.cio.gov , https://certificate-transparency.org , and https://twitter.com/konklone

A curated list of AWS resources to prepare for the AWS Certifications

A curated list of awesome AWS resources you need to prepare for the all 5 AWS Certifications. This gist will include: open source repos, blogs & blogposts, ebooks, PDF, whitepapers, video courses, free lecture, slides, sample test and many other resources.

	#!/usr/bin/perl -n

	#
	# Achtung: Das Skript ist ein fieser Hack, welcher vermutlich nicht in allen
	# Faellen funktioniert. Fuer mich hat es fuer erste Experimente
	# ausreichend gut funktioniert.
	#
	# Einzelne Ausgabe von "pdf2txt" einer einer einzelnen PDF Datei
	# als Parameter oder via Pipe uebergeben.
	#

	#### Contents of the preconfiguration file (for stretch)
	### Localization
	# Preseeding only locale sets language, country and locale.
	d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US.UTF-8

	# The values can also be preseeded individually for greater flexibility.
	#d-i debian-installer/language string en
	#d-i debian-installer/country string US
	#d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US.UTF-8

	https://gnu-linux.org/building-ubuntu-rootfs-for-arm.html
	"2) Extract the downloaded image with ‘sudo’ to allow ‘mknod’ commands to work"

	# get a cloud image from here
	# https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/xenial/
	# https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/xenial/current/

	# based on https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~maas-images-maintainers/maas-images/maas-ephemerals/view/head:/bin/img2squashfs#L161
	# extract a cloud image rootfs to a directory, sudo is needed for `mknod`s to work
	# doesn't have to be .tar.gz - could well unsquashfs an existing squashfs

	#!/bin/bash

	vault mount -path=rootpki pki
	vault mount-tune -max-lease-ttl="175200h" rootpki
	vault write rootpki/root/generate/exported common_name=example.com ttl="175200h"
	vault write rootpki/root/generate/internal common_name=example.com ttl="175200h"
	vault write rootpki/intermediate/generate/exported common_name=example.com ttl="175200h"
	vault write rootpki/intermediate/generate/internal common_name=example.com ttl="175200h"
	vault mount -path=intermediatepki pki
	vault mount-tune -max-lease-ttl="8760h" intermediatepki