Use the following command to get a list of files sorted from large to small on your unix machine. du -ak |sort -rn |less If you want the output to be more “human” readable use: du -ah |sort -rh|less This is useful if you want to cleanup your files, or when a disk is filling up.

Most of us get irritated by Facebook’s news feed at some stage of our lives. You can take some control back by installing Social Fixer

If you run a so called “New Generation Firewall” it will probably have an IDS/IPS system that scans all traffic. This eats a lot of CPU and slows down your firewall. There are lots of reliable lists (blocklists) of IP addresses out there that you can use to drop traffic from the bad guys before scanning, saving lots of CPU and increasing your throughput. Research the lists you plan to use, here is a good place to start your research: FireHOL IP Lists. Read more

To make your own soap is really easy and you know exactly what is in it, unlike the stuff you buy at the store. Homemade soap is often much higher quality than store bought. Here is two links that will get you started. http://soapcalc.net/ https://www.thesage.com/index.html Run all soap recipes through one of the lye calculators you can find on these sites.

There are various methods to get CPU information on FreeBSD sysctl -a | grep -i cpu | less sysctl -a | egrep -i 'hw.machine|hw.ncpu|hw.model' “sysctl” retrieves the kernel state. You can also use dmesg to get the information: dmesg | grep -i cpu grep -i cpu /var/run/dmesg.boot

If you don’t like the default shell on your system you can easily change it with the chsh command e.g. chsh -s /opt/local/bin/bash You will be asked to enter your password to make the change.

Wordpress is a very nice publishing platform that is very easy to install and use. Unfortunately with its plugin system it can become very bloated and slow. This site uses ghost. It uses node.js. It is much faster than wordpress, but your typical shared web hosting doesn’t support it. This site runs on a small Google cloud compute engine instance. If you can’t/don’t want to use Google cloud and can’t find a hosting provider that will support node. Read more

To reset (flush) the DNS cache on Mac OSX depends on the OS version. One of the following commands in the terminal should do it for you. sudo dscacheutil -flushcache or sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder or sudo discoveryutil mdnsflushcache

The simplest way to reset the DNS cache on your iphone is to switch it to Airplane mode and back. Airplane mode switches of all network connectivity, this has the side effect of clearing the DNS cache.

A few comments on your privacy and this website. This website does some tracking for functional and statistical purposes using cookies and in some cases will store details like your email address. We also log the ip address you used to connect to the site for a short period for fault finding purposes. The network you connected from and the pages you visited are stored for statistical purposes. None of the information stored can identify you as an individual. Read more