osx

Just a quick note for the internet at large: to remap the zoom, favorites, shortcut buttons, etc. on a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, when using Apple OSX, you need to use USB Overdrive.

Just open the preferences pane, and hit the special key you want to modify. It appears in the list, and you can remap it to anything. Extremely useful.

EDIT: For a more complex solution, which is powerful but harder to learn, try ControllerMate.

My favourite bash prompt looks like this:

It's created using the following value for PS1 in bash profile:

PS1="\[$txtgrn\]\h::\u [\[$txtpur\]\W\[$txtgrn\]]\$ \[$txtrst\]"

I've configured the various different servers I use to be different colours, and all of them to be red when running as root.

Follow the guide here on ArchWiki.

When configuring a Samba server, remember that the discovery of machines on the network happens not only with DNS but also with a few other mechanisms. I recently setup a number of virtual machines for developers, that were created by cloning a single instance.

Mistakenly, I thought that adding a DNS config entry for each virtual machine on the host's /etc/hosts would be enough, but it's not. What we found was that everyone was connecting to the same VM (another requirement was that they be on the same subnet).

Since I don't have access to the network's DHCP server, the key is to change each Samba server's NetBios name to be unique.

A dump of useful settings: