Configure Lenovo Thinkpad T480s fingerprint reader on Debian Bullseye

The fingerprint sensor on Lenovo Thinkpad T480s is not supported by libfprint, so you can’t use it out of the box. Thankfully, there’s a project called python-validity based on open-fprintd that’s easy to set up in, like, 5 minutes. Setup python-validity is available from open-fprintd PPA.

One-click random password generator

I’m frequently required to quickly get a hold of a random password. I’m either resetting password for a client or I’m testing something and I need a throwaway set of credentials. There are many ways to generate a random password (using DuckDuckGo, online password generator, password manager, etc.

Web feeds are not dead yet!

I remember using the web feeds (RSS and Atom) in Mozilla Firefox in the early 2000s. It was the time before social networks such as Facebook and Twitter took the web by storm. Sharing, liking, and retweeting didn’t exist at the time, and “following” certain blog or news site boiled down to bookmark the site.

Vim as Python IDE

I’m by no means a Python developer, but as a sysadmin, I’m constantly interacting with Python - my scripting language of choice. My preferred text editor is Vim, which I’ve been using for as long as I can remember. I’ve never been a fan of bloating applications with unnecessary plugins and modules, and Vim is no exception.

Installing Tesseract OCR 4.0 on CentOS 6

Tesseract OCR package is available for CentOS 6 via EPEL yum repository, but unfortunately, at the time of writing this article, the latest available Tesseract version in EPEL is 3.0.4. Installing Tesseract 4.0 from source is possible, but with some extra effort as CentOS 6 doesn’t come with Leptonica 1.