jeltsch's blog

Compiling
I sometimes use Latex. I would like to use it more often, but I guess I belong to the Wysiwyg generation. In fact I use it so rarely that I even forget how to compile a document. The following is therefore just a reminder for myself; the filename is doc.tex:
latex doc
bibtex doc
latex doc
latex doc
dvips -Ppdf doc.dvi
tex4ht doc.tex
mk4ht oolatex doc.tex
This creates a PDF file and an OpenOffice file out of the Latex file.

You could write zeros to the whole hard drive

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

For newer versions of dd, you can monitor the progress:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda status=progress


Once you have decided to encrypt your hard drive, you might find yourself in the situation where you need to pull off data from it when the regular decryption mechanisms you use are not in place. E.g. when the OS is not booting or the drive has some physical problems. In that case you need to boot from a CD/DVD that supports the encryption technology that you used. In my case I need a live Ubuntu CD/DVD, preferably the same version that was used to encrypt the disk! Otherwise there might be incompatibilities:
sudo apt-get install lvm2 cryptsetup