Here’s a short step-by-step how to unpack files to any custom location you wish. If you used this for some automated purpose, you could easily create and destroy the temporary structures on the fly by looking at the tarball contents first.

There are many reasons why forcing people to play their games through services like steam is wrong. But let’s save that for another day and get you playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim without connecting to steam.

This is the simplest way I know to get samba up and running. This isn’t the most secure, best, smartest, etc. It’s just for testing and getting up and running as quickly as possible.

After you get through the initial basic system configuration, here’s a quick how to get VirtualBox up and running in minutes on Debian Squeeze. The only package group i’m going to assume you installed was “SSH Server”.

Bonding multiple interfaces together is kind of a pain. After trial and error, I got trunking working between Debian Squeeze and a switch with LACP support.

Create a simple class of dictionaries to make a dictionary of dictionaries. No need for generators, iterators or lambdas. Use a deck of cards for example.

You don’t need heavyweight communication layers for very simple message passing between threads in python. It’s pretty simple to use pipes and implement your own thread class.

If you like the standard window decorations and dont need/want to create your own buttons to handle custom events, closing a dialog without destroying it is a simple one-liner in pygtk. This is helpful when you have logic that replaces individual widgets inside a dialog and you don’t want to recreate the whole dialog.

Here’s a couple of different ways you can use netsnmp in Python. I had a hard time finding documentation, and what I did find was old and outdated. I figured most of it out just by playing around with the library.

In order from most to least important: It works. It’s free. It’s easy to configure. What more could you ask? There’s even a config generator. Here’s the list of packages required to build on Fedora 12