Free Python Books

Hello, I ran across some free books on Python and I thought I would share them with you. These books are written by Al Sweigart, who has made the books available under the Creative Commons License. So the books are free and legal for you to read and download. Click on the image of the book to go to the site hosting the free book.

The link below is the main site the books are on and there are also some free videos. There is also some online courses as well.
http://inventwithpython.com/




You can also get some free Python from Amazon as well. Use this link, to to see a list of Python books sorted by price, from low to high. These are kindle books that can also be read online with the kindle cloud player, if you don't have a kindle.

(Updated) Free Cryptocurrency Payed Directly to Your Wallet

There are many sites that offer free cryptocurrency. Many of these sites are called faucets. Faucet websites give tiny amounts of cryptocurrency in exchange for showing you adds. The main purpose of faucets is to promote the coin there offering. Many of these faucets make you come back repeatedly before you can withdraw the funds to your cryptocurrency wallet. I have found some faucets that payout immediately to your wallet, no more waiting. Using these websites will not make you rich, but free money is free money and the ads on the sites I'm showing are not excessive.

So far I have only found a few faucets that pay directly to your wallet. If you know of any addition faucets please post them below.


This is an update to this blogs previous Free Cryptocurrency Payed Directly to Your Wallet post. There are a few faucets from the previous post that are no longer working, but perhaps in the future they will work again. The Most of the Waves coin faucets are the still working. I have added more faucets to this list, which include new faucets for these coins: ZenCash, Minexcoin, Denarius, and Bitcoin Green.


ZenCash (ZEN)
ZEN is a major coin so getting coins coins from a ZEN cash faucet is a big deal. 

http://getzen.cash/ 

This faucet pays from 50000 to 150000 Satoshis every 20 hours. The only issue is that now you need to have an account on the site and that is a real pain.

Link to the ZEN web wallet: https://myzenwallet.io/

Waves (WAVES)
The Waves faucets are managed by the Waves stacking or mining pools. This is to promote the Waves coin and to encourage you to lease Waves coins with them. One interesting thing about the Waves coin is that it is a Proof of Stake (PoS) coin, meaning that holding the waves coin in the Waves wallet will earn you more Waves coin. But unlike other POS coins you can only stake by leasing the coin out hte coin to the pool.

Freewaves
You will get some Waves coins and the option to get some random tokens. This faucet can be used every hour per IP address.

WavesDrop
You will get some Waves coins and the option to get some random tokens. This faucet can be used every hour per IP address.

FountainPerpetua
You will get some Waves coins and the option to get some random tokens, usually Mercury (MER) tokens. This faucet can be used every hour per IP address.

Link to the Waves web wallet: https://wavesplatform.com/ 
The Waves wallet is a multi coin wallet and has a built in exchange.

MinexCoin (MNX)

The coin also has a banking feature called "MinexBank"where you can earn interest by "parking" there coins.

xdeathwing
This faucet pays out every 6 hours. This is tracked via your IP address. There are no ads on the site and the payout is really fast. One nice feature of the coin is that you can park it and earn interest.

MNX doesn't have a web wallet, so you will have to install a client on your computer.


Denarius (DNR) 
This coin can be mined (POW) and staked (POS) and the coins can be put into a Master Node.

xemplarsoft
This faucet pays out 0.002 every 24 hours. The site seems to track your withdraw from the faucet via your router's IP address and not your wallet address. The site also works through a VPN. There are no ads at the monument.

One easy way to get a DNR wallet is by joining their Discord. If you chose to use the wallet from there Discord server beware the address changes, so check it before you use the faucet. If you are active on the Denarius Discord server they sometimes payout free coins to there members, this is commonly called rain. I was able to get 10 coins on the coins birthday, which I put in a shared Master Node. Click on the word Discord for the Discord invite.

The Coinomi wallet supports this coin, and you can get it for your android or apple device. 

Bitcoin Green (BITG)
This is a Proof of Stake (PoS), so if you stack the coin it will earn you more coins.

bitgfaucet
This faucet is often always dry. You can claim every 12 hours.

They have wallets you can install on your computer.





Faucets listed below have stopped working but might come back in the future.

Bytecoin (BCN)

The Bytecoin faucet was managed by bytecoin.org the developers and maintainers of Bytecoin.

Freebytecoin

This faucet can be used once an hour per IP address. They have recently switched to a manually payout system so you will not get the BCN instantly. You will however get the payout in a timely manner.


WAVES (WAVES)

WavesGo
This was the best and most reliable Waves faucet, when it was working. In the past you got some
Waves coins as well as some WavesGo (WGO) tokens. This faucet used work once hour, per wallet address.  Did at one time work though a VPN.


Conclusion
Remember this will not a get rich, so don't put a lot of effort into getting the coins. Faucets are just meant to promote the coin. Many coins are switching to Airdrops as there main way to promote a their coin. Sometimes the faucets will stop working or are under maintenance, so if it is not working try again later. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions or comments please post them below. If you know of any faucets that payout to your wallet, and are not to a site connected CoinPot or Faucet Hub, please let me know.

Wallet Tip
Use a webwallet if you don't have many coins that are worth a lot of money. If you start to collect a lot of valuable crypto then switch to client wallet or a hardware wallet. If you end up needing to install the a lot of client wallets on your computer. Then install it on a external or removable storage device, because some of these wallets can get very big and and take a lot of space on your local hard drive. If you fill up your hard drive your computer, the computer can get slower or even crash (stop working).


My ZenCash wallets address
znaBJT8amzTdGLhk985QvZnN1QbF8G3M5NH

My Waves wallet address 
3P9nJZ9PSb8yR8pueB4WbBtLvD4raDi6Ah8

My Minexcoin wallet address
XYupxVDW4yWD2nG6eS68YLhKSq76DnLsHi

My Bytecoin wallet address
28ExGFyTXTPdCHYqPqkNasMjTYHpnHFgG7KAAEcQpKkYKoX1UzLzHdsgjykcu8CuQRG9SxEoSH7YxCHJVp7Ui9es3WSjGDt

How to setup Claymore on EthOS

Today I’m showing you how to setup the Claymore dual miner on EThOS. Ethos is Linux based operating system specially designed to mine cryptocurrency. In the examples we are going to dual mine Callisto (CLO) and SmartCash (SMART), but Claymore can be used to mine any number of coins. The reason I make this video was because EthOS has changed the what configuration files you can use. The local.conf or remote.conf files are still the most important files for mining on EthOS, but we used to be able to supplement these files with stub files. I go over the new way to do things now that the stub files are no longer an option. Now we have to use the flags option to this in local.conf. I also go over some advanced settings.


Below I have included the a copy of the file I used in the video. Remember to replace my info with your info.


Example files Local.conf
---------------------------------
globalminer claymore
stratumproxy enable
proxywallet 0x33496bf2654acbdbe501accc9393790707e89ad3
proxypool1 stratum+tcp://lb.geo.callistopool.eu:8001
poolpass1 x
proxypool2 stratum+tcp://clopool.pro:2561
poolpass2 x

dualminer enabled
dualminer-coin keccak
dualminer-pool
stratum+tcp://us-mine.smartcash.cc:3008
dualminer-wallet SaMXJJ4CjFRDVwJceAEQfE2QfUMKuRpiGt
dualminer-poolpass1 x

claymore=flags -eworker trio -dcri 8,8,8 -colors 1 -allpools 1
--------------------------------------
To add failover pools for the 2nd coin edit this file: /opt/miners/claymore/dpools.txt 

Links to more info
Main Page http://ethosdistro.com/
EthOS knowledge base http://ethosdistro.com/kb/
SmartCash (SMART) https://smartcash.cc/
Callisto (CLO) https://callisto.network/

Turn a list into a CSV file

Hello today I'm showing you two simple ways to turn a list into a comma separated (CSV) output. This is helpful if you need to import the output into a spreadsheet. You can do this one of two ways, with a BASH for loop or with SED.

We are going to use list.txt which is a small list of solar objects for this example. 

list.txt

earth
moon
mars
venus
saturn

BASH Script

for s in $(cat list.txt)
do echo -en "$s, "
done

-note - if you don't want spaces or commas use "$s" instead

man@earth> ./BASHscript
earth, moon, mars, venus, saturn,

SED Script

cat list.txt |  sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/, /g'

As you can see the SED statement is much shorter.

man@earth> ./SEDscript
earth, moon, mars, venus, saturn,

I hope someone out there finds this useful. If you have any questions or comments please post them below.

Free Books

We all love free stuff, right? So in this post I list some sites that I found that offer free books. It is also important to protect the rights of content creators, so I'm only listing free books that are totally legal to download. If you know of any sites that offer free books please provide a link in the comments below.

Free Novels
Free Books from publisher BAEN
Lots of totally free books books on the BAEN website from may different publishers and genre types.

LibriVox
Free public domain audio books. These books are several different languages. Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project. They get most of their texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive hosts their audio files (for free!).

Project Gutenberg
This a site that hosts free ebooks in many in the public domain. They also have ebooks in several different languages

Verkaro Audiobooks
This site has many free audio books. they used to be called LiteralSystems.org. The books span many different genre.

ManyBooks
This site has over 33,000 eBooks to choose from. These books are in many different genres.

Internet Archive
This site is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

BookBub
"BookBub features limited-time offers for the best free books in over twenty genres, from both top-tier publishers and critically-acclaimed independent authors. These free ebooks are available on all devices, including Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Android. Check out some of our current selections" - https://www.bookbub.com

Google
Believe it or not, Google has a lot of free books on there site. Though some of the books are just excerpts of books for sale.

Free IT text books
DevOps books
This is a absolutely free collection of free It professionals or people who want to get into IT.

Free PDF Books
Free technical books and  lectures in PDF form.

Safari Books Online
Safari books online is the place to get Oreilly IT books. It is not exactly free, but you can get a free trail.

I hope this info will hope some get some free and legal books. Don't forget there is also the public library. Please fee free to post any additional info on free and legal books below in the comments.

Free Dev Ops Tech Books

Below is a link for some free to some free IT books. Just go to the link and pick the book or books you want and down load the PDF. Feel free to share and read.


Free Dev Ops Books

Free Cryptocurrency Payed Directly to your Wallet

There are many sites that offer free cryptocurrency. These sites are called faucets they give tiny amounts of cryptocurrency in exchange for showing you adds. Many of these faucets make you come back repeatedly before you can withdraw the funds to your cryptocurrency wallet. I have found some faucets that payout immediately and/or directly to your wallet, no more waiting.

So far I have only found the one faucet for Bytecoin and a few related faucets for the Waves coin. Using these websites will not make you rich, but free money is free money and the ads on the sites are not excessive. One interesting thing about the Waves coin is that it is a Proof of Stake (PoS) coin, meaning that holding the waves coin in the Waves wallet will earn you more Waves coin.

Faucets rules
All of the the Faucets listed below will allow you to withdraw once per hour. All but one of the faucets below track you using your IP address. In order to withdraw more then that you will need more then one external IP address. The WavesGo faucet tracks you via the waves wallet address, so for example if you have 2 Waves wallet address then you can withdraw 2 times an hour.

Bytecoin (BCN)

The Bytecoin faucet is managed by bytecoin.org the developers and maintainers of Bytecoin.

Freebytecoin

This faucet can be used once an hour per IP address. They have recently switched to a manually payout system so you will not get the BCN instantly. You will however get the payout in a timely manner.

WAVES
The Waves faucets are managed by the Waves stacking or mining pools. This is to promote the Waves coin and to encourage Proof of Stake (PoS) mining of the Waves coin.

WavesGo
This is the best and most reliable Waves faucet. You will get some Waves coins as well as some WavesGo (WGO) tokens. This faucet can be used once hour, per wallet address.  Will work though a VPN.

Freewaves

You will get some Waves coins and the option to get some random tokens. This faucet can be used every hour per IP address.

WavesDrop
You will get some Waves coins and the option to get some random tokens. This faucet can be used every hour per IP address.

FountainPerpetua
You will get some Waves coins and the option to get some random tokens, usually Mercury (MER) tokens. This faucet can be used every hour per IP address.

Wallets
If you want to withdraw BCN or Waves from the faucets you will need a wallet.

Go to the Bytecoin website for a list of Bytecoin (BCN) wallets.

Waves Lite wallet

The Waves Lite wallet can also can also be used to hold Bitcoin, Ethureum,  Litcoin, and Zcash. The wallet also has a builtin exchange called DAX. The DAX exchange can be used to sell the tokens you get. The wallet is also needed to do Proof of Stake pool mining.

Exchanges
Many exchanges will not except small payments to there exchange wallets. Bittrex will not except the tokens or the Waves coin from the faucets as the payment amount is to small. The HitBTC exchange will except the BCN and Waves faucet payouts, but the free tokens from the Waves faucet be lost.


Current Bytecoin (BCN) and Waves prices


Sometimes the faucets will stop working or are under maintenance, so if it is not working check back later. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions or comments please post them below. If you know of any faucets that payout to your wallet, and not to a site like CoinPot or Faucet Hub, please let me know.

My Waves wallet address 
3P9nJZ9PSb8yR8pueB4WbBtLvD4raDi6Ah8

My BCN wallet address
28ExGFyTXTPdCHYqPqkNasMjTYHpnHFgG7KAAEcQpKkYKoX1UzLzHdsgjykcu8CuQRG9SxEoSH7YxCHJVp7Ui9es3WSjGDt

Manually Update Plugins on a Nessus Scanner (Windows)

I had an issue the other day with one of my Nessus Vulnerability Scanners which is being managed by Security Center. In Security Center the status of one of the Nessus scanners showed "Plugin Out of Sync". I tried to push the plugins to the Nessus scanner from the Security Center, but I was getting a status error of "Connection timed out".  So basically I was getting a latency issue on the connection. The Nessus scanner and the Security Center are in different states, so this may be why there is so much latency. I just built this Nessus scanner, so there were just too many plugins to be pushed over the wire by Security Center. To fix this issue, I just manually copied the plugins to the Nessus scanner. Then I manually loaded the plugins into the Nessus scanner. After I did this, I have not had this issue again.

Manually updating the Plugins can sometimes fix error or scanner status of "Protocol error". These instructions work on Nessus 5x and 6x, when managed by Security Center 4x or 5x.

Follow the instructions below to manually install plugins for the Nessus scanner on a Windows computer. For Linux computers click here.

1. Login to the Nessus scanner.

2. Open PowerShell or the Windows command line (CMD) as privileged user.

3. Stop the Nessus service

# net stop "Tenable Nessus"

4. Remove the Nessus scanner from Security Center

5. Reset the scanner

# …\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus>nessuscli fix --reset

6. Connect the Nessus scanner

# …\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus>nessuscli fetch –security-center

7. Load the plugins into Nessus

# …\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus>nessuscli update plugins_file.tar.qz

8. Start the Nessus scanner

# net start “Tenable Nessus”

9. Login to the web interface for Nessus and verify that the configuration is complete.
https://localhost:8834

10. Login to the web interface for the Security Center. Add the Nessus scanner back and verify connectivity.

Your done.

Related posts
On this Blog

Turn off BEEP in BASH

Sometimes your on a computer that has speakers and if your on the termial it keeps beeping. This can be annoying if all your doing is using the tab key to use auto complete. Who ever thought that making the terminal beep was a good idea? Anyway below are some ways to get ride of the beeps.


In /etc/inputrc file add the line below.

set bell-style none

Put the line below in a profile. If you want to set it globally but in /etc/profile, otherwise set it in bash_profile, .bashrc, and/or .profile.

setterm -blength 0

This will make the beeping sound go away for good. If you have any questions or comments please post them below.

How to clear Nessus Plugin 42873 on Security Center

I use Security Center with Nessus scanners from Tenable to do vulnerability scanning on my servers. Sometimes the scanner finds hits on itself, such as a hit on plugin 42873 "SSL Medium Strength Cipher Suites Supported" on the Security Center. Below I show the steps needed to disable 3DES on Security Center..

To disable 3DES within Security Center do the following:
1. Open the file /opt/sc/support/conf/sslciphers.conf

2. Search for DES-CBC3-SHA

3. After the colon that precedes the above string, add an exclamation mark which is the signal to disable the given cipher.

4. The whole string should look like :!DES-CBC3-SHA:

Once complete, restart the SC service and complete a rescan and this vulnerability should be remediation.

To clear the other part of this hit, make sure the server is using SSL ciphers have encryption key length of over 112 bits. 

Reference Plugin 42873
https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2016/08/24/sweet32/

Rename & Combine Audio Book files into one audio book.

I like to listen to audio books and I get them them from places such as Audible, books on CD, the library or LibriVox. The issue is that all these places present the files to you in different ways. You can get one big file or a lot of small files. They all use different naming conventions which can make organizing your books difficult. To play my audio books I use the iBooks app from Apple and the Audible app form Audible, on my iPod Touch. Apples iBooks app works well but is missing some features that the Audible app has such as the bookmarking feature. The Audible app is really bad at playing books that are broken up into several files. The app will play the files out of order or show each file as a separate book.

So to fix the issues described above I recommend that you rename and/or combine all the files from one book into one file. Below I show the BASH script I wrote to fix this issue. I wrote and tested this script on a Mac. This script will also work on Linux and UNIX operating systems. After the files are combined the finder didn't show the right length for the audio book but when I imported the file into iTunes everything displayed right and the file worked fine.

The script below shows how to combine several MP3 files into one file. I put a comment after each command explaining what it is doing. If you have any questions about the script below ask it in the the comment section below.

script-book

Put contents of files here

#!/bin/bash
# This script was created on 20170216
# This script was created to combine MP3 files form audio books into one file.
# usage ./script-book bookname
#
if [ -z "$1" ]
  then
    echo -e "Please rerun the script with desired file name at the end \n 
              Example: ./script-book bookname"
    exit 1
fi

# The if statement checks for $1 variable. 

# If no variable is present then the gives error message and exits 

for s in $(ls |grep .mp3|egrep -v '(png|jpg)'|awk '{print $NF}')
# egrep removes pictures
# $NF gives the last column in the file name. This removes the spaces in the name.
do mv *$s $1$s
# This renames the files
cat *$s >> $1.mp3
# Cat combines the files
rm *$s
# Removes old files
done
ls -lh

In order to make the script work, copy it into the same directory the audio books files are located in. In the example below the script is called script-book and the ls command shows the script in the same directory as the audio book files.

man@earth> ls
The Hot Gate 001.mp3    The Hot Gate 021.mp3    The Hot Gate 041.mp3
The Hot Gate 002.mp3    The Hot Gate 022.mp3    The Hot Gate 042.mp3
The Hot Gate 003.mp3    The Hot Gate 023.mp3    The Hot Gate 043.mp3
The Hot Gate 004.mp3    The Hot Gate 024.mp3    The Hot Gate 044.mp3
The Hot Gate 005.mp3    The Hot Gate 025.mp3    The Hot Gate 045.mp3
The Hot Gate 006.mp3    The Hot Gate 026.mp3    The Hot Gate 046.mp3
The Hot Gate 007.mp3    The Hot Gate 027.mp3    The Hot Gate 047.mp3
The Hot Gate 008.mp3    The Hot Gate 028.mp3    The Hot Gate 048.mp3
The Hot Gate 009.mp3    The Hot Gate 029.mp3    The Hot Gate 049.mp3
The Hot Gate 010.mp3    The Hot Gate 030.mp3    The Hot Gate 050.mp3
The Hot Gate 011.mp3    The Hot Gate 031.mp3    The Hot Gate 051.mp3
The Hot Gate 012.mp3    The Hot Gate 032.mp3    The Hot Gate 052.mp3
The Hot Gate 013.mp3    The Hot Gate 033.mp3    The Hot Gate 053.mp3
The Hot Gate 014.mp3    The Hot Gate 034.mp3    The Hot Gate 054.mp3
The Hot Gate 015.mp3    The Hot Gate 035.mp3    The Hot Gate 055.mp3
The Hot Gate 016.mp3    The Hot Gate 036.mp3    The Hot Gate 056.mp3
The Hot Gate 017.mp3    The Hot Gate 037.mp3    The Hot Gate 057.mp3
The Hot Gate 018.mp3    The Hot Gate 038.mp3    The Hot Gate 058.mp3
The Hot Gate 019.mp3    The Hot Gate 039.mp3    The Hot Gate 059.mp3
The Hot Gate 020.mp3    The Hot Gate 040.mp3    script-book

Note- Make sure the script is executable before you run the command as shown below. Alternately you can also run the script by bash before the command if you don't know how to make the script executable. Example: bash ./script-book bookname

In the example below the I show how to execute the script and show example output. This shows that the script combined the files listed above and named the file TheHotGate and removed all the old unneeded files.

man@earth> ./script-book TheHotGate
total 447744
-rw-r--r--  1  arich   staff    219M  Feb 20 11:34    TheHotGate.mp3
-rw-r--r--  1  arich   staff    624B   Feb 20 11:33    script-book

I hope this helps anyone who is having a similar issue.


Links to places to get audio books.

LibriVox

             Audible