Me & Linux

I just spent an hour cleaning out old files on my Linux box.  Lately I had noticed that sometimes the web browser stalls while the hard disk is getting hammered. Looking in Files (the Linux file management program) I see that I have about 5 GB of space left. I have tried deleting some things, but it hasn't made a noticeable difference, I still had only about 5 GB of free space. I could have opened my Linux reference book and read up on the subject, but hey, we've got the internet, so I posted a question on the Linux Mint Forum and I quickly got several helpful responses, one of which included this bit of Linux weenie cryptography.

sudo du -chd1 / --exclude={proc,dev,sys,media,mnt,run,tmp,lost*,cdrom}

It's a command-line command, copy it (using normal browser controls)  and then paste it into a Terminal window (using special Terminal window controls) and I quickly have an overview of who's sucking up all the space. It's me, of course, and all the crap I have been dragging around with me every time I change computers. Changing directories (using the cd command) and repeated applications of

sudo du -chd1 .

(the dot means operate on the current directory) allows me to track down the biggest offender, which turned out to be about six levels down. Deleting a bunch of ancient crap makes me feel better, but it doesn't do anything for my bottom line, which still shows only 5 GB of disk space. (5 GB!?! Back in the day when I got started in this business we were lucky to have 10 MB.) Empty the trash, silly, and suddenly we have 30 GB of free space. That should be enough room to play with for a couple of months or so.

Now I'm looking at the forum and I realize my avatar is a blind snowman standing in front of a concrete wall. Not exactly putting my brand out there. We ought to do something about that, so I root around and find a copy of the image to upload, but the forum doesn't support uploading. They want a link to a photo that is already on the web. Well, I am the master of my internet browser, I should be able to deliver that, except I can't.

I try using the link to the avatar from this blog, but it goes nowhere. Stealing the link from the page source works, but the image is too big. I try uploading the photo to Google Drive, but it won't provide a link to the photo, but it will export it to Imgur, except it won't. So enough screwing around with these fancy web services that don't work, let's fall back to old reliable (sort of) Blogger, so that's how we come to have this post with the tiny little picture of me at the top.

Update 2 minutes later: using the link to the picture from this blog post worked!