Misc Linux things: PATA or SATA, mutt and mailcap, tarsnap backup

The other day, I wondered whether the drive in my laptop was PATA or SATA. Fortunately, I didn’t have to tear it apart to find out. I simply wandered over to stackexchange.com and asked the question. Here’s the answer:

lspci -d $(cat /sys/block/sda/device/../../../vendor):$(cat /sys/block/sda/device/../../../device)
readlink -f /sys/block/sda/device/../../../driver

I’m a long time user of the mutt email client (as well as Thunderbird). At some point, viewing the HTML attachment (with the ‘v’ key) stopped invoking ‘lynx’ via my mailcap file. It turns out that the developers of mutt added an internal viewer, and moved mailcap support to the “m” key. I took the time to switch from using ‘lynx’ to using ‘links’. Here’s the entry from my $HOME/.mailcap file:

text/html; /usr/bin/links -dump -force-html %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html

I’ve been gradually looking for an online, off-site Linux backup tool forĀ  the past few years. I tried spideroak, but wasn’t pleased with the giant log files it kept in my home directory, and it wasn’t designed to back up files outside of my user account. Lately, I stumbled on another promising tool: tarsnap. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will. Pricing looks reasonable, and since it “deduplicates” storage, it means that I shouldn’t be backing up the same thing repeatedly. Here’s how one person configures tarsnap to keep up to X daily backups, Y weekly, and Z monthly.