A quick guide to getting Mozilla VPN working on a headless Linux server


Mozilla VPN logo.

The Mozilla VPN service is great, but it doesn't work using the CLI if you have a "headless" server. After a bit of faffing about, I got it working. I suffered so you don't have to. Get an account Sign up and use code MOZILLA20 for a cheeky 20% discount! Get a token in the browser To start with, you'll need to get an authentication token. This requires you to be on a machine which can run a modern browser like Firefox or Chrome. On a computer with a GUI, download MozWire. This is an…

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Anatomy of my perfect ls command


Unix is user-friendly — it's just choosy about who its friends are.

Mostly notes to myself. Nestled away in my Linux Bash profile, I have this one-liner alias lh='ls -trhgGN --color=always | cut -d" " -f4-' When I run lh it outputs a list of files in the directory, showing their size, with the newest files on the bottom. I use this regularly to see what I've downloaded recently and how big the files are - so I made an alias. Here's how it works. Alias Alias is a Jester in disguise useful Linux tool which lets you create a shortcut to…

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Screenscraping Album Artwork From The Linux Command Line


Cover art for The Beatles' Sgt Pepper Album.

Like many people, I've collected a fair number of CDs over the years. As hard-drives and MicroSD cards have got larger and cheaper, I've gradually been ripping them to FLAC. Most CD rippers automatically tag the music files with the correct metadata and, nowadays, they will also download and embed album artwork as well. (As an aside, it always boggled my mind that CDs don't come with metadata burned onto the disc. Even a single spare megabyte would be enough to hold detailed track listing,…

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