Amazon Echo’s are able to broadcast messages to every device in a house. If you’re like me and you have Alexa then you can wake up everyone in your house at the same time. I’m not sure you want to teach your kids this, but the magic word is broadcast. Or announce. There are a few different phrases you can use to tell Alexa to send an announcement to every Echo in your house. Some of these include: “Alexa, announce that it’s time to get up! (which has an added benefit of adding a rooster noise to your broadcast) “Alexa, broadcast” “Alexa, announce that breakfast is ready” (which means come…
-
-
Managing Core Dumps
The core dump is a memory image of a processes in-core state that is written to the /cores directory by default and is named core followed by a . and then the pid number. So if a process with pid 87 crashes a file is written by default at /cores/core.87. The feature can be turned off using sysctl, along with the kern.coredump MIB, setting it to 0 (by default it’s 1). sysctl kern.coredump=0 To turn it back on: sysctl kern.coredump=1 Additionally, you can change the path that the files are written into, using sysctl along with the kern.corefile MIB. The corefile is an expression that by defualt writes core.%P where…
-
Scripting in Google ChromeOS
I recently got my hands on one of those Google ChromeBooks (Cr-48). Interesting to have an operating system that is just a web browser. But, as anyone likely reading this article already knows, the graphical interface is the web browser and the operating system is still Linux. But what version? Well, let’s go on a journey together. First, you need ChromeOS. If you’ve got a ChromeBook this is a pretty easy thing to get. If not, check http://getchrome.eu/download.php for a USB or optical download that can be run live (or even in a virtual machine). Or, if you know that you’re going to be using a virtual machine, consider a pre-built…