My PC is on literaly 24/7 as I run a FAH (Folding At Home) client and Transmission to seed the RPi and Ubuntu image torrents, but when I want to use my machine I have to pause them both as they bog the machine down.

This was a manual task I had to do every time I sat down and I had to remember to set them both going again when I was done, something I didn't always remember to do at 3AM after a session of "I'll just do a little more..."

Out of habit I lock my PC whenever I leave it and I thought that was an ideal trigger to pause/resume the FAH client and Transmission!

I was doing some forensic analysis of PHP scripts on a server a while ago and wanted to capture all parts of the HTTP requests these scripts were recieving. I was suprised to find no one else had done this, or at least hadn't shared it, so I wrote my own...

The other day I was generally tidying the various document, images and scripts that seem to slowly become scattered about my home directory and noticed something strange had happened, the MATE Places menu now had a bookmarks submenu?

I thought I had broken something after my attempts to change the icons in that menu earlier the same day, turns out it's way simpler than that! All that's happening is that if you have more than 8 bookmarks MATE will show them under a Bookmarks submenu.

So for once I hadn't broken anything, this was actually a feature. I thought I would share this as I couldn't find any mention of this when I was trying to find out what was going on.

Today I was writing a script that needs to run without user interaction and need to get the latest version of a single file from a private BitBucket Git repo over SSH.

BitBucket allows you to do this over HTTPS and I could use something like curl or wget with digest auth but then that would require the user name and password to be added to the script in plain text...

Not ideal, esspecially when SSH keys are already setup and far more secure than passwords, but there is a solution...

When you dont have an automated deployment system setup and you push code to the production server you will need to manually run all the task runners, namely Composer.

All the articles you read will tell you to never run composer update on a production server but why? and why does it not warn me?