KD0YTE's Ham Radio, Linux, and other stuff.

I don't have many windows tips on this blog as I don't use it a lot
But sometimes you need to help a friend with a problem. One of those problems is how to reset a drive in windows.
Maybe you want to sell it or give it to someone.
The way to do this under windows: open a cmd prompt as administrator
type diskpart enter
then type list disk enter
drives will be listed
C will be labeled as disk 0 other disks will be sequential
Be careful to choose the right one. "Danger Will Robinson"
type select disk 1 (or whatever disk you need to wipe)
then type clean
then type exit and enter twice to get out of the command prompt.
To use the drive in windows use disk manager to initialize the drive.
How secure is the clean procedure?
A greybeard might have a way to recover the data but most folks will not.
There are more secure ways to wipe the drive but it is much more trouble.

Taskwarrior is a linux command line task manager and reminder app
there are many command line options but the simplest are as follows.

Adding a task:
$ task add "task description"

Listing tasks:
$ task
will output as follows

ID Age Description Urg
1 2min check out obsidian 0
2 1min finish printing spacers 0

Deleting a task
$ task del "task number"

Sometimes you need to discover the specs on the hardware you are running.
For example: cat /proc/cpuinfo will give you detailed info about your cpu
neofetch and fastfetch are quite popular for giving you other specs but
a more powerful command is dmidecode
the command must be run as root or with sudo it has several command line options as follows.

dmidecode -t to see info about your pc
keywords are
bios
system
baseboard
chassis
processor
memory
cache
connector
slot

for example
sudo dmidecode -t processor will show details about your cpu

dmidecode is included with most distributions
lsh is another useful tool but must be installed as an additional package