I’ll keep it short and sweet but here’s the top list of tools that I’m using in various tech areas of my life.

FASD - Making me more of a speed daemon on cd’ing around terminal along with instant vimming from anywhere. PEW PEW!

Alfred - Speed daemon in graphical environment with starting new programs, running terminal commands, etc. Akin to Launchy, Gnome-Do, Quicksilver (which I wish worked better on my Mac). [This one is Mac specific but see other programs for different OSes]

iTerm2 - Customizable and nicely integrates with tmux. [Mac specific, but on Linux I’ve been super happy with Terminator]

tmux - Terminal multiplexer. Like screen, but much more easily customized. Feels like a VIM take on screen control once it’s tweaked.

VIM - My favorite editor. Mainly used in the terminal but occasionally I use MacVim for the glitz.

Vimium - Bring the powers of VIM into the Chrome Browser. Very very slick interface, especially for opening links, scrolling … just go install it.

VimRepress - Blog with Wordpress from the safety confines of VIM (as I am now)… in MARKDOWN!

GoogleCl - Commandline access to Google features such as Contacts and Calendars. Great for adding events from the commandline. Python tool IIRC.

QuickCursor - Lets me use VIM to edit just about anything. It opens a new VIM instance/buffer with the highlighted text, say from an email and pushes it back into that spot after editing w/ Vim.

BetterTouchTool - Nice easy way to assign keystrokes to open a program, move window to specific region of screen, etc. Also complemented by BetterSnapTool.

TaskWarrior - Task manager on the commandline. Like Todo.sh but with more commandline power and no Android/iOS app. Worthwhile trade at the moment after 3 weeks use. Does have a Sinatra app with TaskWarrior integration… and I’m tempted to scrape together a Ruby tool to have commandline Pomodoro tracker that integrates with Growl and TaskWarrior (as an annotate function)

And in no specific order:

-Dropbox, Evernote, DashExpander, Pomodairo, TweetDeck, Sparrow/Thunderbird (Sparrow for slick integration, Thunderbird for extensions and power), and last but certainly not least Z-Shell.

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter if I’m missing any good tools!

@_zph

Wow, this one stumped me for the better part of 12 hrs… So Puppet (the Ruby Gem) uses SSL certificates to authenticate to the Puppet Master.  I kept receiving the warning listed in the title of this post no matter how I altered my configs. Here’s the short version: Determine what Fully Qualified Domain Name is being used by the PuppetMaster to created the signing cert.  On my virtual platform this ended up being the hostname Add that hostname/FQDN and it’s IP address to your PuppetClient’s /etc/hosts like so: 173.999.999.999    hostname Now start up the PuppetMaster Server with the following command # puppetmasterd --verbose --no-daemonize Now invoke the puppet client like so: puppet agent --no-daemonize --verbose --server=HostnameOfServer Finally, now that we know it’s working well edit the /etc/puppet/puppet.conf on Puppet Client so that you have a server entry in the [main] section: [main] server=HostnameOfServer Tada!   Source of partial answer: Puppet hostname doesnt match server certificate - Server Fault.

So, your instructions say to edit config.xml while setting up a program in Ubuntu/Debian Linux. You realize you don’t have a clue where it’s at… sudo apt-get install locate && sudo updatedb Then once it indexes your files, type a quick locate config.xml to find it. At this point you realize it’s buried in many sub folders of subfolders, but you need to edit it with your favorite editor (vim, nano, emacs..) If it’s the only result from the locate command, type vim locate config.xml``.  This uses command interpolation to substitute the answer of the locate request :). There should be a snappy way also to chop the results (if more than one appears)…but I’m out of time!

After trying to install #! (Crunchbang) Linux on a laptop, I received an error that wouldn’t let me boot into the system. Turns out all that needs to be done is append the following command your kernel boot line: intel\_iommu=on   More details available here in the bug report (where I found the answer): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/742296

/etc/ssh/sshd_config Controls these actions and has a line: AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized\_keys2 If not present in /var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh/ (ie mine was authorized_keys not authorized_keys2) then link one with the right name to it ie ln -s ~.sshauthorized\_keys2 ~.sshauthorized\_key I found a reference stating that authorized_key and authorized_key2 were historically different files denoting where public keys were stored respectively for SSH Protocol 1 and SSH Protocol 2. With Protocol 1 having some vulnerabilities, this seems to be more of a legacy issue. As an aside, I tried it and then swapped it out for x2go… so far it’s been a good choice given my technical requirements and lean financial constraints. Community version of FreeNX limits to 2 TS connections at once :(. Reasonable on their side but I needed more.

Setting up a friend’s WP blog on a VPS Debian box. Open Book Plugin wouldn’t work insisting that curl wasn’t present on the system (despite apt-get update && apt-get install php5-curl showing it’s the most recent). Loaded a php file to test if it was a recognized extension by creating a file named info.php in the web root for that site including the following code:<?php phpinfo(); ?>After pulling this document up in a browser, I deleted the file :). This pointed me in the right direction showing that the PHP.ini was deferring to /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/curl.ini I checked there and it was extension=curl.so as expected, but obviously it wasn’t being correctly located. Did the following as root locate curl.so and found it @ /usr/lib/php5/20090626/curl.so Commented out the current curl.ini file for a byte trail of my actions and appended extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626/curl.so Then a quick service apache2 restart and we were back in business. Thanks to this blog for pointing me in the right direction: http://www.ivankristianto.com/os/ubuntu/howto-install-curl-in-php-apache/379/