logic involved

I just noticed one nifty feature of my MacBook Pro: “automatic” deep sleep.
When you close the lid of your MB(P) and the white light on the front begins to flash slowly, it has suspended. As soon as you open it, it will wake up and fetch its session data from ram. That takes just a few seconds, and then you are good to go.
But what happens if the Mac loses power while suspended? All data stored in ram would be lost, and a normal reboot would be required. So a “suspend to disk” seems to be a better choice – but a wake-up would be pretty much slower.
Mac OS X is pretty clever: it seems to go for “suspend to ram” by default, but persists your session to disk as well. So you get a fallback (“wake from disk”) whenever the Mac has been suspended, but “wake from ram” failed.

I really like PuTTY – it might not be the perfect terminal emulator, but it does its job quite well. But sometimes you need to fumble around a bit to find the perfect settings for yet another server.

However, I found these default settings with quite useful:

Window -> Appearance -> Font: Courier New or Lucida Console
Window -> Translation -> Character Set: UTF-8
Window ->Translation -> Line Drawing: Use Unicode Line drawing code points

Netbooks are popping up everywhere. They are small and powerfull enough to be used with Windows, but on most of them Linux runs just as well. But since they don’t bring DVD or CD-ROMs along in most cases, Linux has to be installed with the help of an bootable USB stick.

Fortunately there is UNetbootin. This handy little tools allows to install a standard Linux/BSD image on your flash drive. No need to fiddle around with command line parameters, just download the desired distribution, run UNetbootin, letting the tool prepare your USB drive, and reboot. That’s all

UNetbootin supports a variety of distributions: Ubuntu, openSuse, Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Slax, CentOS, Gentoo, … and much more!

Note: Fedora is bringing another tool to the party. Check for the details of their liveusb-creator here.

You need some simple way to wake up another computer? And you have Python at your disposal?
Great! All you need is this tiny script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
s.sendto('\xff'*6+'\xaa\xbb\xcc\xdd\xee\xff'*16, ('172.31.3.33', 80))
print "sent wake up call to server..."

Substitute the aa, bb, … , ff with the MAC adress of your target, and use the correct IP adress.
That’s all

The User Agent String – an internet phenomenon. Internet Explorer 7 claims to be “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)”, for example.
Learn about the history of the user agent string in this brilliant post