If sherried single malt is very much your thing, then GlenDronach is a name you should get to know very well. The distillery resides in the Highlands, busily working away on some incredible expressions, with sherried malt sitting at the core of many of them. This particular dram, The GlenDronach 12 Year Old, is allowed to age in a combination of Oloroso and Pedro Ximénez casks from Spain, resulting in generous helpings of dried fruit and Christmas spice running through it. Bottled without chill-filtration or additional colouring, you can expect great stuff from this approachable single malt.

Highland Park 12 Year Old remains one of the gold- standard malts for other distillery bottlings to aspire to. With a delicious sweetness (heather-honey is their preferred description) and a warming, silky mouthfeel, this is a whisky that never lets you down. "The greatest all-rounder in the world of malt whisky". Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson's Malt Whisky Companion

This bottling has been replaced by Highland Park Viking Honour

The entry level bottling from Scotland's most northerly distillery, Highland Park, aged for 12 years with plenty of citrus and green notes.

Tasting Note by The Chaps at Master of Malt

Nose: Fresh, clean and very aromatic. Floral notes abound the senses with a light grassiness. Notes of creamy Manuka honey and a touch of juicy citrus with cream and a well-balanced sweetness.

Palate: Rather full with a pleasant depth. Lurking somewhere in the substratum a grilled orange lies. Notes of granary toast and green tea with jasmine. A touch of sweetness.

Finish: Quite long with peppery spice and wood shavings.

The goto shell utility allows users to navigate to aliased directories and also supports autocompletion.
How it works

Before you can use goto, you need to register your directory aliases. For example:

goto -r dev /home/iridakos/development

then change to that directory, e.g.:

goto dev

goto.gif
goto demo
Autocompletion in goto

goto comes with a nice autocompletion script—whenever you press the Tab key after the goto command, Bash or Zsh will prompt you with suggestions of the aliases that are available:

Explore Joe Grand’s life journey as a hardware hacker. Known as Kingpin, his curiosity has been manipulating electronic devices since the 1980s. Learn more about his hacker lifestyle and get a glimpse inside Joe’s mind as he explains how hacking, technology and engineering fuels his passion.

GitHub has just beta-released GitHub CLI, an open-source tool that allows developers to work with issues and pull requests from the command line. Written in Go, GitHub CLI can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Using GitHub CLI, developers will be able to list open issues and filter them based on assignee, label, and state; to create pull requests; to check out pull requests locally; to view the status of your work, and more.

Accenture released its Technology Vision 2020 report with a call for corporations to build trust as they develop new services for a "post-digital" population that has moved beyond the wow-factor with new technologies and understands the dystopian possibilities in an unplanned future.
Featured

It's not a total backlash against tech but a love/hate relationship that Accenture dubs a "tech-clash."

“Code is law” is a form of regulation whereby technology is used to enforce existing rules. With the advent of Blockchain and Machine Learning, we are witnessing a new trend, whereby technology is progressively taking the upper-hand over these rules.

This release adds support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators to
OpenSSH. U2F/FIDO are open standards for inexpensive two-factor
authentication hardware that are widely used for website
authentication. In OpenSSH FIDO devices are supported by new public
key types "ecdsa-sk" and "ed25519-sk", along with corresponding
certificate types.

ssh-keygen(1) may be used to generate a FIDO token-backed key, after
which they may be used much like any other key type supported by
OpenSSH, so long as the hardware token is attached when the keys are
used. FIDO tokens also generally require the user explicitly authorise
operations by touching or tapping them.

I also use a tool called Storm, which helps you add SSH connections to your SSH config, so you don’t have to remember them all. Y

A nice feature I’ve become used to in the last year is a so-called “smart directory changer” that keeps track of the directories you change into, and then lets you jump to popular ones quickly, using fragments of the path to find the right location.

There is quite some prior art in this, such as autojump, fasd or z, but I could not resist building my own implementation of it, optimized for zsh.

For bureaucratic reasons, a colleague of mine had to print, sign, scan and send by email a high number of pages. To save trees, ink, time, and to stick it to the bureaucrats, I wrote this script.

It's just been one security disaster after another for Intel the last few years. Meltdown, Spectre variant after variant and this week the "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" aka Zombieload attack have all required performance-degrading fixes and workarounds. There is no way around turning hyperthreading off to be safe from MDS/Zombieload and this is a rather high performance-price to pay. So what if you don't want to?

Disabling SMT/HyperThreading to get full protection against MDS/Zombieload on top of the mitigation code for "meltdown", several "spectre" variants and other security-issues discovered on Intel CPUs is a high price to pay for security on Intel CPUs. The total performance-penalty in many workloads is adding up. Unfortunately there is no safe and secure way around the performance-penalties - so you may want to..

An IT-etymology/linuxguistics page for people wondering "how come the package yasysmand-cling has such a strange name?"

Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition, and the explanations are often missing from the documentation, either because the developers imagine it's obvious (usually wrongly) or because they think nobody cares (and here they're usually right, or it would turn up as FAQ material).

After RTFM’ing, I realized, under the hood, systemd just runs mount command to mount the specified partition with the specified mount options listed in the mount unit file. Basically, you need to specify the following options in your unit file:

What= a partition name, path or UUID to mount
Where= an absolute path of a directory i.e. path to a mount point. If the mount point is non-existent, it will be created
Type= file system type. In most cases mount command auto-detects the file system
Options= Mount options to use when mounting

In the end, you can convert your typical fstab entry such as this:

UUID=86fef3b2-bdc9-47fa-bbb1-4e528a89d222 /mnt/backups ext4 defaults 0 0

to:

[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/86fef3b2-bdc9-47fa-bbb1-4e528a89d222
Where=/mnt/backups
Type=ext4
Options=defaults

textadventures.co.uk is a community of interactive fiction game makers and players.

All games here are either playable in your web browser, or as an app for your smartphone or tablet. Almost all are free, and you can even make your own, using our free software - Quest or Squiffy.

John Chu is a “sherpa”—a paid guide to online role-playing games like the popular Call to Wizardry. For a fee, he and his crew will provide you with a top-flight character equipped with the best weapons and armor, and take you dragon-slaying in the Realms of Asgarth, hunting rogue starships in the Alpha Sector, or battling hordes of undead in the zombie apocalypse.

Chu’s new client, the pseudonymous Mr. Jones, claims to be a “wealthy, famous person” with powerful enemies, and he’s offering a ridiculous amount of money for a comprehensive tour of the world of virtual-reality gaming. For Chu, this is a dream assignment, but as the tour gets underway, he begins to suspect that Mr. Jones is really North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, whose interest in VR gaming has more to do with power than entertainment. As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Chu also has to worry about “Ms. Pang,” who may or may not be an agent of the People’s Republic of China, and his angry ex-girlfriend, Darla Jean Covington, who isn’t the type to let an international intrigue get in the way of her own plans for revenge.

What begins as a whirlwind online adventure soon spills over into the real world. Now Chu must use every trick and resource at his disposal to stay one step ahead—because in real life, there is no reset button.

A wonderful, whimsical journey through the pioneering space-race graphics of the former Soviet Union

This otherworldly collection of Soviet space-race graphics takes readers on a cosmic adventure through Cold War-era Russia. Created against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty, the extraordinary images featured, taken from the period's hugely successful popular-science magazines, were a vital tool for the promotion of state ideology. Presenting more than 250 illustrations - depicting daring discoveries, scientific innovations, futuristic visions, and extraterrestrial encounters - Soviet Space Graphics unlocks the door to the creative inner workings of the USSR.

Paul Mason joined us in London to talk about his book PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future. Recorded in December 2015, London.