Move a Window Between Monitors with the Keyboard

This one will be really quick. I wanted to share something I found today in the hopes that someone else finds it useful. I was looking for a way to use my keyboard to move windows between monitors in Gnome3. It already has the built in shortcuts for moving between workspaces with ctrl+alt+shift+{UP,DOWN} but I wanted to move my window between left and right physical monitors. To do this, you'll need to install xdotool and write a very short script. My steps below will work on Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. The only difference for Debian based systems should be the command to install the package and possibly the location of xdotool after installation. To find out where it is located run the following command which xdotool. Download xdotool with your package manager:

sudo yum install xdotool

Create a file called move-window-to-display.sh. I prefer to place my scripts in ~/bin but any directory will work.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $1 -eq 2 ]; then
    POS="1680 0"
else
    POS="0 0"
fi

/usr/bin/xdotool windowmove `/usr/bin/xdotool getwindowfocus` $POS
exit 0

Next we need to make this new script executable:

sudo chmod +x ~/bin/move-window-to-display.sh

The script above is written assuming your monitors are 1680 pixels wide. If your monitor is wider or narrower change the value of $POS from "1680 0" to "1024 0" or "1440 0", etc. The settings I've placed here also put the window in the top left corner of the monitor upon being moved. If you wish to place it elsewhere you can treat these numbers as X and Y pixel coordinates and put whatever value in them you would like. The first definition of $POS is for the right monitor and the $POS in the "else" portion is for the left monitor.
Finally we need to assign it to a keyboard shortcut. I chose Alt+Shift+{LEFT,RIGHT} but you can choose whatever you like as long as it doesn't conflict with another shortcut (I found that combinations with the super key did not work for some reason as well). You can set these by going to the Gnome "Keyboard" tool. Click "Shortcuts" at the top and go to "Custom Shortcuts" on the bottom of the left hand list. From there, click the [+] button and give the shortcut a name and in the "Command" field give the full path of the above script and at the end append a "1" or "2" depending on which monitor you would like to move to.

No more Google Reader? Try Tiny Tiny RSS!

It's old news now but, in case you've been living under a rock, I should let you know that Google Reader is shutting down. As a result, many users, myself included, have been looking for a solid replacement. I'm happy to report that I think I've found my new home in Tiny-Tiny RSS. After trying out many other alternatives, among them The Old Reader and Feedly I have found that this simple, self-hosted solution really does everything I want. What's more? Did I mention it's Self Hosted!?

At this point you're probably asking yourself, "But Ted, why would I want to go through all the effort of setting up and maintaining my own server just for an RSS reader?". A local RSS reader has it's limitations. Sure, you could copy your reader's config around with you on a flash drive or use a cloud storage solution like Owncloud to move it around your machines, but then you have to figure out what reader works on all of your platforms. A web reader is, generally, a much more flexible route as it, usually, works on all platforms and Tiny-Tiny RSS even has a native Android app. So why not just use a hosted solution like Feedly, TheOldReader or GoogleRea.... oh, right, because these are run companies who have the right to shut down down a product whether you like it or not. By hosting it yourself, you only have to answer to what you want, it doesn't have to shutdown just because the rest of the market would prefer to hear what their neighbor had for breakfast on the insert latest social media/micro-blogging site, you control the site, you control the content, you control it's fate.

I found Tiny-tiny RSS to be extremely easy to set-up. Now, don't say, "But you're a sysadmin, that's not saying very much". Well, I pride myself on trying hard to analyse things from the average user's (or at least average Linux user's) perspective. If you know how what the terminal is, can edit a plain English configuration file and have a spare computer or shared web host just laying around (or even if you don't), Tiny-tiny RSS takes only a few minute to set-up.

The Install

The installation of Tiny-tiny RSS requires that you have a web host running php and mysql or postgres. I've outlined the basic installation procedure below:

1. Download the .tar.gz file from here (as always, make sure you get the latest version).


2. Extract this to your web directory. On most servers this will be /var/www. Make sure your apache user owns this directory, on Ubuntu you can do this with: chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/ttrss


3. Once you've downloaded the files and extracted them to your web directory, you need to tell apache where to look. Since you're going to be logging in to this server, you'll probably want to use HTTPS. It's not necessary but I strongly encourage it. I've copied my server configuration below as an example of how to do an port 80 (http) to port 443 (https) redirect to make your life easier when navigating to your feeds as well as the main apache configuration I used. If you're lucky enough to have a server running Ubuntu or Debian (or other Debian dirivative that uses the /etc/apache2/site-available directory structure) you can just copy paste these two files to /etc/apache2/sites-available and proceed.
   
   /etc/apache2/site-available/yoursite-redirect
   

   
   <VirtualHost feeds.yoursite.com:80>
       RewriteEngine on
       RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
       RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [NC,R,L]
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   /var/apache2/site-available/yoursite
   

   
   <Virtualhost feeds.yoursite.com:443>
       ServerName feeds.yoursite.com
       ServerAdmin admin@feeds.yoursite.com
   
       DocumentRoot /var/www/tt-rss
   
       SSLEngine on
       SSLCertificateFile      /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
       SSLCertificateKeyFile   /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
   
       <Directory /var/www/tt-rss>
           Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
           AllowOverride None
           Order allow,deny
           allow from all
       </Directory>
   
       ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/feeds_yoursite_error.log
   
       # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
       # alert, emerg.
       LogLevel info
   
       CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/feeds_yoursite_access.log combined
   
       Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/
       <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
           Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
           AllowOverride None
           Order deny,allow
           Deny from all
           Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
       </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   
4. Disable the default apache configuration and enabler your new ones:
   sudo a2dissite 000-default && sudo a2dissite default-ssl
sudo a2ensite yoursite && sudo a2ensite yoursite-redirect


5. Since we're using apache's ssl module along with the apache rewrite module to redirect you to https://, we need to enable two modules:
   
   sudo a2enmod ssl && a2enmod rewrite
   
   enable php as well if not already:
   
   sudo a2enmod php


6. Restart apache:
   
   sudo service apache2 restart


7. Set cronjob for www-data to refresh feeds periodically. To do this run the following command and paste the following line (making changes where appropriate for your site). The example I have given will refresh all feeds, for all users, every 30 minutes.
   
   sudo crontab -u www-data -e

*/30 * * * * cd /var/www/tt-rss && /usr/bin/php /var/www/tt-rss/update.php --feeds >/dev/null 2>&1

That's pretty much it for the install. In addition to the web interface, you can also download the Android app from the marketplace. It's free for the demo and only a few dollars to buy forever. I have used the app for a few days now and have come to like it almost as much, if not more, than I loved the Google Reader app.

Syncing Encrypted Files Between Multiple Platforms

This is going to be a fairly short and quick how-to on syncing encrypted files between different systems running different operating systems. The software we will be using is EncFS (on Linux) and Boxcryptor (on everything else).

First thing we need to do is choose what we're going to use as the common storage point for the encrypted files. Boxcryptor supports Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, WebDav and SD card. Since Google hasn't gotten their act together on a Google Drive application for Linux and I don't have anything running WebDav, I chose to use Dropbox.

Download Boxcryptor to your device (I chose to use my Android phone) and select to connect it to your drop box account. Once connected, click the button to create a new encrypted folder. Once you have done this, we can move on to setting up your Linux desktop with EncFS. If you don't have any Linux systems (shame on you) you can stop here and repeat this process of setting up BoxCryptor on your other close source platforms. The only difference being that instead of creating a new folder, you'll be selecting the one you created from your first device.

Setting up EncFS on Linux can be a bit tricky. This is mainly due to the fact that a lot of tutorials I found around the web recommended that you use the "CryptKeeper" application as a front end. I tried this and it was terrible. I would recommend skipping it all together and just using the command line utility "encfs". To do this, use your package manager to download fuse-encfs. "apt-get install fuse-encfs" on Ubuntu and "yum install fuse-encfs on RHEL/Fedora". Next, download and install the dropbox build for your distribution. Sign in to your account and let it sync your files. Once it finishes synchronizing we're ready to set-up the encfs mount. Run "encfs ~/Dropbox/path/to/folder.bc ~/mount/point/for/encfs". This will prompt you if you want to create the mountpoint (if it does not yet exist) and then your encryption passphrase.

Thats it! It's important to note that in order for files to be encrypted, you must access the directory via the mount point, not the raw directory within dropbox. To demonstrate this, you can create a text file within the "~/mount/point/for/encfs" and put some random jibberish in it. Save the file and then try to read the file from the raw directory, in this case, ~/Dropbox/path/to/folder.bc. You'll notice that the contents of the file when viewed outside of the mountpoint is scrambled.

Please feel free to ask any question in the comments section, I'll be happy to help you out if you get stuck or send me a message on Google+ if that's more convenient.