Asterisk is a free software program (under GPL license) that provides PBX (Private Branch Exchange) functionality. You can connect phones to make calls between them within your home (or office) and even access external communications, to the PSTN (like Movistar) or by connecting to a VoIP provider or ISDN links (basic or primary). …
In environments where you need to operate multiple computers simultaneously, efficiency is key. There are several products that mimic the functionality of a KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse), which historically allowed you to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers by physically turning a dial. In this post I describe how I install and use Barrier, a software KVM solution, without the need for additional hardware. My use case involves controlling three computers with a single keyboard and mouse. Two of them are desktops – a Mac and a Windows PC. The third is a Windows/Linux laptop. The difficulty lies with the Mac, where I encountered a curious and nearly insurmountable challenge. …
tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows you to have multiple sessions (shells) in a single window. From your Mac, Linux, or even Windows (with WSL) terminal, in a single window you can have multiple active sessions, switch between them, view them simultaneously, enter one and disconnect (they keep running in the background), and reconnect to it in the future. …
To find all available users on a macOS system from the command line, you can use a Bash script. The macOS operating system, like other Unix-like systems, stores user information in various system files, primarily in /etc/passwd. macOS uses Open Directory for user management, so you can use commands like dscl to query this information. …
In this post I explain how I manage my data on a Mac. My goal is to work at full speed from anywhere with the most frequently used data, have extra storage for less accessed data, and of course have multiple backups. The source data lives on the Mac’s internal SSD and a couple of external drives. The replicas and backups are on iCloud, a remote Linux server, and Google Drive. Multiple locations, different technologies, speeds, and needs. The rclone tool is perfect for helping me maintain multiple synchronized backups. …
In this post I describe how to repurpose an old MacBook Air (2015) by installing Linux on it and extending its useful life. Over time, these Macs become nearly useless machines, painfully slow and with insufficient memory. Why not take advantage of them with Linux? A 2015 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB drive can become a very useful machine. …