Neofetch for displaying system information

Originally designed for use in demonstrations on Linux bash in an easy to understand way that could be used in screenshots and demos. In my experience I’ve found that it also makes it easier to review details of remotely administered and virtual machines or images when performing maintenance.

Neofetch shows Operating System, uptime, CPU, GPU, and memory information. While built for linux bash, it can also be installed on macOS and Windows machines.

Installation for Linux is as simple as:
sudo apt install neofetch

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Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Mining

Unless you’ve been completely removed from society over the past 10 years or so, you’ve likely heard about Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. While the technology behind them may beyond most peoples understanding and buying a single Bitcoin is likely too expensive for many people (as of today its over $56,000 USD = 1 BTC), you can still get in on the craze by mining. At the core of crypto currency is some really complicated math, mining is the process of having a computer perform some of those calculations. Usually this is done with entire farms of computers with high-end CPUs or GPUs. Regardless of your hardware you can still get in on the action by joining services that combine the actions of many users into smaller units of work.

While there are many providers out there, I’ve found that the client offered by CudoMiner is one of the easiest for most users to install and run on modest hardware running Windows, Linux or OS/X. After setup, you just have to leave your device powered and connected to the web to use the idle time to earn some money.

With the increase in remote workers and students over the past year, I’d expect that at least a few of those organizations have figured out that they can use the idle time on those devices for mining to increase their revenue stream.

Remove Landscape on Ubuntu

The Canonical/Ubuntu Landscape service has been around for as long as I can remember using Ubuntu. A free trial period is enabled (re-enabled?) when a new installation occurs, that allows for a server administrator to see performance metrics and uptime information for any hardware that is running the client. After the trial ends, it is still a quick means of visually observing some key statistics in the terminal MOTD at login. I’d also noticed that it was still doing DNS lookups to “landscape.canonical.com” on a regular basis, and while I did not look for it, I assume that some information was still being collected and reported upon.

As there are MANY other ways to get server performance information, I decided that it was time to be rid of landscape itself.

Removal is easy, as only one line is required… I chose to “purge” all references, though you can “remove” if you feel inclined to leave any configuration for possible later re-installation.


sudo apt-get purge landscape-client landscape-client-ui landscape-client-ui-install landscape-common

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