Note on Kristoffer Opsahl

How to Securely Erase a Hard-Disk Drive

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Using dd to Write an .iso to a USB Drive

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 17:16:05 +0000

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.

My Alacritty, Zellij, and Helix Development Setup

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:20:15 +0000

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.