.xsession-errors can grow HUGE

Problem
Something funny happened to me today. I logged in to my desktop machine at my workplace when a warning message told me that “disk space is low”. A quick “df -h” indicated that it’s true, my HDD is at 100%! How is it possible, I should occupy no more than 30%. After hunting for 10 minutes for the guilty file/directory, it turned out that the file .xsession-errors in my HOME directory grew more than 200GB! WTF?

Solution
I removed this file and under the name .xsession-errors I put a link on /dev/null. However, after a reboot the symbolic link was gone and .xsession-errors became a regular file again. Tricky :) So I added the following lines to the end of my .bashrc file:

# .xsession-errors can grow huge... remove it
if [ ! -h $HOME/.xsession-errors ]
then
    /bin/rm $HOME/.xsession-errors
    ln -s /dev/null $HOME/.xsession-errors
fi

if [ ! -h $HOME/.xsession-errors.old ]
then
    /bin/rm $HOME/.xsession-errors.old
    ln -s /dev/null $HOME/.xsession-errors.old
fi

It verifies if .xsession-errors is a symbolic link. If not, remove it and replace it with a symbolic link.

Get rid of the “new tab” button

Problem

You want to get rid of the “new tab” button:

Solution

With the add-on Tab Mix Plus you can remove it:

MC: get the same folder in the other panel

Problem
In Midnight Commander, you want to see the same folder in the other panel.

Solution

Alt + i

It can also be a good idea to run through the manual for more tricks: “man mc” :)

Download files with wget from sites that verify your user-agent

Problem
You want to download a file from a given site with your favourite wget utility but you get a “403 Forbidden” error in your face. Of course, everything works from your browser. What to do?

Solution
If it works from the browser but it fails with wget, then the site must check your user-agent. If it sees “User-Agent: Wget/1.12 (linux-gnu)” (version may vary), then it simply blocks you.

But don’t fear for a second. Simply fake a different user agent with wget and continue downloading.

Solution 1:

wget --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0" http://host/file.jpg

Solution 2:
If you don’t want to provide a user agent each time, put the following your ~/.wgetrc file:

# custom .wgetrc file
user_agent = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0

Then:

wget http://host/file.jpg

Open Firefox with lots of tabs in an instant

Problem
You open Firefox with tabs from the last time. However, reloading these tabs takes lots of time and thus Firefox starts slowly. What to do?

Solution
Go to Preferences -> General, and check “Don’t load tabs until selected”.

Diablo 1 strategy guides

I decided to play some with Diablo 1 again. Here are some useful strategy guides:

• Freshman Diablo (list of guides)
• warrior strategy – Diablo – GameSpot Forums
• level up strategy
• Diablo 1 strategy guide
• Diablo
• Wolfslayer’s warrior guide

Troubleshooting
Under Windows 7 I had some problems with Diablo 1: the colors looked strange. The fix is very simple: just kill the process explorer.exe and Diablo works fine. Here is a batch script for launching the game correctly:

@echo off
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
diablo.exe
pause
start explorer.exe
exit