Posts

Using locate, updatedb, mlocate and plocate on Linux with encrypted home directory

I love using " locate " command on Linux. Finding files in a blink of an eye. Combining with " updatedb " it works amazingly fast. I discovered that if your home directory is encrypted (or other directories are encrypted), by default locate command will not find anything in those directories. The better solution is to build a local indexed database of your files: updatedb -l 0 -o ~/.my_locate.db -U $HOME And then using this database to search for files: locate -d ~/.my_locate.db "part file name"    You may also want to edit: cat /etc/updatedb.conf And look at disregarded directories and filesystems: PRUNEPATHS, PRUNEFS  

Someone using Tencent servers have been attacking my websites

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Someone using Tencent servers have been attacking my websites, mostly from China, Singapore, Vietnam, but also the US and Brazil. I usually have around 1K people surfing my website at any given time. Occasionally my website https://www.gematrix.org is getting published in a blog about Gematria and numeric values and I get higher traffic organically.  This attack was happening on multiple websites I own, not just this one, but the attack was made more brutally on Gematrix and at this website I investigated it. Lately, my website started crushing down. Did not worked properly. Responses were very slow.  Looking a bit more deeply into it, I could see I have around 12K visitors at the same second in my website which caused the delay. Like thousands of thousands requests per seconds. I did two things: 1. One of them is what I call "scale better": I have improved the way I handle requests, improved the caching and improved the database querying, schema and access.  Thanks god I...

Creating and adding to Linux file manager a right-click action using nemo_action

When using the file manager I like files to be sorted by date descending. Hence seeing the newest files and directories first on top and the ones I recently updated. The problem is when you have nested directories and you update a file in a sub directory. For example, consider this directory structure: - flights    +- Athens 2026-01          +- Hotels If I add or update something in the "Hotels" directory, the "Athens 2026-01" directory does not pop up because I updated a sub-dir. For this, I like the command " touch " in Linux. Touch allows me to change the timestamp of a file or a directory (and also creates new files and more). I wanted to add the option inside the GUI of Linux file manager to right-click and "touch" a directory or a file. I used nemo_actions (nemo actions) option to do so. Step 1: Open the Actions Directory Nemo looks for custom actions in a specific hidden folder.  Open your file manager (Nemo). Press Ctrl + H to show hidden...

My Tiny Spreadsheet Extension - A spreadsheet that lives in your browser

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Download now   The problem You need a simple fast spreadsheet  Google Sheet is clutters up Excel files are lost Google Sheets are saved on the cloud You need an account to use Google Sheet  The solution: My Tiny Spreadsheet Extension A small spreadsheet inside your browser Data is saved locally It's fast It's good for smart note taking   Install Extension   https://freesheet.io  

GeekCon 2025 - Building an Arcade Machine (rhythm machine)

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GeekCon is by far the best conference I have ever participated in. If you are not that familiar about GeekCon , so shortly, once every year, around September we gather from all around Israel and outside of it, a bunch of heavy geeks, makers, developers, scientists and crazy technology savvy people to build crazy projects, non profit for a full weekend. Learn more . Some examples from this year 2025, a robotic Lama that follows you and spit on you, a huge keyboard and a missile defense system that throws chairs on missiles, and more ... This year, I went to GeekCon with my son and from his choosing we have decided to build an arcade machine, with a rhythm game. You need to press the buttons by the rhythm   The spec was like this: Writing the game (rhythm machine game) in Python Running the game on a Raspberry Pi  (Version 5) Connecting the buttons and reading the buttons state on the RaspberryPi Using the buttons in the game Building the arcade box itself (+printing butto...