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Hard-disk drives (HDDs) should be securely erased before being sold or recycled. This is a public note-to-self on how to achieve this in a simple and timely manner. Prerequisites The shred binary, which to my knowledge is included in all major Linux distributions. Moreover, you need a HDD which will be subject to secure erasure. You can NOT use shred to SECURELY erase solid-state drives (SSDs) or so-called non-volatile memory express (NVMe) devices. This is due to physical differences in the mechanism used to store information. ...

dd is one of those commands for which I have to look up proper usage every usage because I use it regularly but not often. As such, this is a public note-to-self, which may or may not be useful to the reader. Prerequisites The dd binary is, to my knowledge, included on macOS and all major Linux distributions. Writing the File dd if= of= status=progress The if option tells dd to read from the provided path instead of stdin. The of option tells dd to write to the provided path instead of stdout. The status option tells dd to show periodic transfer statistics. The status option is primarily included because the program can otherwise seem unresponsive upon writing large .iso files, as the transfer to disk can take several minutes to complete. ...

This article is a public note-to-self where I’ll go through the basic configuration I use to get new computers ready for programming in just a couple of minutes. It is centered around the following pieces of software: Alacritty, a terminal. Zellij, a terminal multiplexer. Helix, a text-editor with support for LSP, and tree-sitter. In my selection process, I heavily emphasized performance, as I strongly dislike when my IDE can’t keep up with my thoughts. I also favored software with sane defaults, such that almost zero configuration is required for great usability. The programs are free, cross-platform, open-source, and they all happen to be written in Rust. ...