Five Linux habits that quietly save me hours every week

Erich Rincon — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:04:47 +0000

I run Linux on my laptop and on a couple of small servers. The things that actually save me time are not clever - they are habits, and most of them I picked up while reading guides like the ones collected at linuxmind.dev. Here are the five that stuck.

1. Keep long jobs inside tmux. Install once, start a session, detach with the prefix key and the job survives your SSH connection dropping. Splitting a window into panes also beats opening six terminals. The full walkthrough, key bindings included, is in Multiplex Terminals with tmux.

2. Let cron do the boring work. Backups, log rotation, pulling the latest config - if you catch yourself running the same command every week, schedule it. The rsync-and-cron combination is the one I use most, and this guide explains it step by step.

3. Know how to close the door. A laptop with an open port on a shared network is not a fun way to learn. UFW is three commands and then you forget about it: Basic security in Linux - set up a firewall with UFW.

4. Look at the machine, not at the graph. htop tells you what is eating memory right now, atop records what was eating it an hour ago when you were not looking. Monitoring your system with htop, atop and glances covers all three.

5. Containers for anything you are not sure about. Not everything deserves a place on the host. Spinning up a throwaway Postgres or a test nginx in a container and deleting it afterwards is the habit that stopped me from wrecking my own machine: First steps with Docker containers on Linux.

None of these are clever. They are just the ones that remove the small, repeated frictions that add up to hours. If you want to go deeper, there is a library of longer guides at linuxmind.dev - the distro installation walkthroughs are especially useful the first weekend you try something new.

Mosquitoes: why they pick you, and what actually works

Erich Rincon — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:29:57 +0000

There are around 3,500 mosquito species on Earth, and only a few dozen of them make our lives miserable. Of those, only the females bite: they need the protein in blood to develop their eggs. Males spend their short lives on nectar and never touch you.

How they find you

Three stages. First they detect the CO2 you exhale from tens of metres away. Then your body heat and moisture. Finally the chemical cocktail on your skin: lactic acid, ammonia, uric acid and the smell of your own skin microbiome. That is why some people seem to be magnets and others walk away untouched - sweat, recent exercise, alcohol, pregnancy and dark clothing all tip the odds.

The buzz is not a warning, it is courtship: wings beat 400-600 times a second, and a male can pick out the tone of a female of his species inside a swarm.

What the bite actually is

The "needle" is six needles: two to cut, two to hold and two to hunt for a vein. She finds one in about ten seconds, and while she does she injects an anticoagulant and a local anaesthetic, which is why you do not notice until she is gone. The welt and the itch are your reaction to her saliva, not the bite - so scratching only makes it worse.

What actually works

DEET 10-30 percent, picaridin 20 percent, IR3535, or oil of lemon eucalyptus: the only repellents with serious evidence behind them.
Screens and bed nets, ideally permethrin-treated.
Loose, light-coloured clothing, long sleeves and socks.
A fan: moving air breaks the chemical trail it is following.
Emptying any standing water every 3-4 days. A bottle cap is enough to raise a brood.

What does not work, however well it sells

Repellent bracelets and ultrasonic gadgets. Vitamin B1 or eating garlic. UV bug zappers, which kill moths rather than the mosquitoes biting you. Citronella candles, which give you half a metre of protection at best.

One last thing: species do not bite at the same time of day. Aedes aegypti (dengue, zika, chikungunya) hunts by day, Culex (West Nile virus) at dusk, Anopheles (malaria) at night.