thinkfan

I run Debian on a ThinkPad T420s. ThinkPad’s have a great Linux compatibility story, and the T420s is no exception. The cooling fan situation seemed in need of some attention though, with fans running at high RPM most of the time. Not only was this really noisy, hit the battery quite hard too. Enter thinkfan, a simple fan control program. Works with any linux hwmon driver, especially with thinkpad_acpi. It is designed to eat as little CPU power as possible. ...

March 19, 2016 · 2 min

awk

After recently getting my hands dirty with the wonderful [sed]({% post_url 2015-09-15-sed %}), the time has come for me to step it up with awk. Incepted in 1977 at Bell Labs, AWK is an interpreted programming language designed for text processing, and is a defacto part of most nix based distributions. The original version of UNIX awk was designed and implemented by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (notice the first letter of their surnames together) of Bell Laboratories. Brian Kernighan continues to maintain and enhance it. Paul Rubin and Jay Fenlason, of the Free Software Foundation, wrote gawk, to be compatible with the original version of awk distributed in Seventh Edition UNIX. ...

January 17, 2016 · 10 min

GNU Stream Editor (sed)

sed has rocked my world. sed (stream editor) isn’t an interactive text editor. Instead, it is used to filter text, i.e., it takes text input, performs some operation (or set of operations) on it, and outputs the modified text. sed is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file. Contents Basic Syntax How sed works Substitution Append, Insert and Delete Multiple expressions Remote with ssh Substitution grouping Numerical grouping Executing Commands sed with Vim Commands Basic syntax sed ' [RANGE] COMMANDS ' [INPUTFILE] If no INPUTFILE is specified, sed filters the contents of standard input. ...

September 15, 2015 · 18 min

NeoMutt setup (2022 edition)

Intro Getting started with mutt 2022 setup cron GPG crypto Address book integration pam-gnupg Intro If you haven’t heard of mutt you’re missing out. Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for UNIX operating systems It’s a command line based mail reader (MUA). The neomutt project is a contemporary fork of the original mutt with added features, patch sets and fixes. I started seriously using mutt as my full-time mail client in 2012. I found its simplicity refreshing. It quickly became apparent how much useless baggage modern graphical mail clients (e.g., thunderbird, outlook, etc) actually bog you down with, not to mention the harrowing way they actually encode mail. Its taken me a long time to appreciate this: ...

August 18, 2012 · 6 min