Somewhere inside the firewall, your packet entered a chain, followed three jumps, and was quietly sentenced to death by a rule written during an emergency in 2022. nft monitor trace lets you follow one carefully selected packet through the bureaucracy and discover exactly where policy became homicide.
2026
13
Sep
Linux Snippets #13: Ask the Machine What Killed It
After a reboot, every Linux server develops temporary amnesia and insists that everything is running perfectly. Fortunately, the journal may remember the OOM killer, dying disk, or panicking service from five minutes earlier. Here is how to question the previous boot before log rotation provides it with legal representation.
11
Sep
Linux Snippets #12: tcpdump Without Capturing the Entire Internet
Capture everything and inspect it later’ sounds reassuringly forensic until the PCAP consumes the disk, records half the office, and still buries the failed handshake beneath six million irrelevant packets. Here is how to make tcpdump answer one question at a time – with limits established before optimism becomes an incident.
08
Sep
Linux Snippets #11: Run It Once, Contain It, Forget It
Some jobs are too important for nohup, yet far too temporary to deserve permanent accommodation in /etc/systemd/system. Here is how to use systemd-run to give a one-off command strict resource limits, logging, and supervision—and then make the evidence disappear.
04
Aug
Linux Snippets #9: The Ephemeral Workspace (tmpfs)
Working with highly sensitive plaintext files or trying to stop your Raspberry Pi from burning through SD cards? Here is how to carve out a chunk of your system RAM and mount it as a physical, completely volatile hard drive.
30
Jul
Linux Snippets #8: Saving a Doomed SSH Session
Forgot to start tmux before running a massive database dump over SSH? Here is how to use native Unix job control to detach a running process so it survives when you close your laptop
13
Jun
When the AI Detector Becomes the Academic Random Number Generator
A new study suggests Turnitin can be oddly harsher on mostly human-written assignments than on fully AI-generated ones. So apparently the safest way to avoid looking like you used too much AI may be to use even more AI. Academia has finally reached peak absurdity: the detector is now grading the crime scene with a blindfold and a random number generator.
26
May
The Virtual OS Museum: A Time Machine Made of Bootloaders, Dust, and Bad Fonts
A nostalgic dive into the Virtual OS Museum, where DOS prompts still blink, GEM still feels futuristic, Linux still smells faintly of 1997, and every boot menu is a trapdoor into another strange, brilliant future we almost got.
16
May
Linux Snippets #6: The Silent Network Sweep
Stop guessing which IP your new Raspberry Pi or IoT device grabbed from the router. Here is the scommand to instantly map your entire local network without triggering alarms
07
May
The Many Punks: A Field Guide to Futures That Refuse to Behave
The future is never just gadgets and skylines. Cyberpunk, solarpunk, cypherpunk, steampunk, and their unruly cousins are not merely aesthetics with goggles, neon, brass, or solar panels glued on top. They are arguments about power: who owns the machines, who gets watched by them, who repairs them, and who dares to build something better.