I maintain and work on a number of repositories on BitBucket for both work and in my own time and use a separate account for each. SSH is used to talk with the remotes and I use my Multi SSH Key Manager to manage the keys.

The problem with this is that the remotes for all BitBucket repos have the same username and server git@bitbucket.org and as soon as I associate a key for git@bitbucket.org with my work account, I can't associate it with my personal account.

I could link the accounts together and then they could both use the same key but I want to keep them separate, so I needed to find a way of telling Git to use a certain key with a certain remote.

Here's how I did it...

I use command line arguments in nearly every bash script I write, they are super useful but when it comes to parsing the arguments it's always a pain.

So I wrote a library that makes it easy!

My PC is on literaly 24/7 as I run a FAH (Folding At Home) client and Transmission to seed the RPi and Ubuntu image torrents, but when I want to use my machine I have to pause them both as they bog the machine down.

This was a manual task I had to do every time I sat down and I had to remember to set them both going again when I was done, something I didn't always remember to do at 3AM after a session of "I'll just do a little more..."

Out of habit I lock my PC whenever I leave it and I thought that was an ideal trigger to pause/resume the FAH client and Transmission!

Some times you want to clone a repository but you dont want all the history and git stuff to. This is a pretty simple task:

git clone user@repohost:repo-name
git checkout the-branch-i-want
rm -r .git

But it can be easier!

When I was building my Multi SSH Key Manager I wanted to display a nice neat table with all the colour coded data in, how hard can that be.. Apparently it's not easy...

In Linux you can run lsusb on the command line to list all currently connected USB devices but you may find a number of the entires give a pretty generic or blank name for the device.

This is simply because those devices aren't listed in your copy of the USB ID database, this database can be easily updated with USBUtils update-usbids.

Awesome problem solved... So what's the problem? You will notice that if you run update-usbids and then run it again right away you will download the database twice.. but I already have an upto date copy of the database...

I use SSH literally every single day, at work and at home, so for security and because I don't want to spend time typing long secure passwords I use SSH keys for authentication.

What's the problem?

Usually you'll generate a key pair with ssh-keygen, copy the public key to any server you want to login to and youre done. So what's the problem with that? Well if you ever want to renew that single key, increase it's length for better security, find out which user and server that key is authorised for etc then you are going to have to change the public key on each of servers you can access.

It would be much better if we had a key pair per user per server, then we can renew, change or delete a key for a single login. We have complete control.

Every time I need to write a new image to my Pi, usually because i've broken it, I have to look up how to write the image, check mounts and find and download the latest version of the image I want. Even then I have no idea if dd is actually progressing or how long i'm going to have to wait...

There wasn't really anything out there that can take an image name and a location and do the rest for me, now there is!