Advertisement

Advertisement

How to Verify a Checksum

A checksum is a special type of hash that is used to verify the integrity of a file. Verifying a checksum ensures there was no corruption or manipulation during the download and the file was downloaded completely and correctly.

A common use case for checksum verification is to verify a large download like an .iso disk image. MD5 and SHA1 hashes are commonly used for this task. We will look at easy ways to obtain a hash to verify a checksum.

How to Verify a GPG Signature

This tutorial covers the process of verifying a GPG signature, which is commonly done to verify the authenticity of a email, document, or downloaded file to ensure it came from the expected source. This only covers verifying signature and not creating them. To learn how to sign and how to sign-and-encrypt, read GPG Tutorial - Signatures.

GPG offers a lot more functionality than just verifying signatures though. To learn more about GPG in general and how to manage keys, encrypt, sign, and more, read my GPG Tutorial.

Curses Programming in Python

The curses and ncurses (new curses) libraries go back to 1980's and 90's and provide an API to create textual user interfaces (TUI). If you write a command-line application, you should consider using curses to implement functionality you could not otherwise do with standard console output. The text editor nano is a good example of a ncurses application. We will look at how to use this library in Python.

Python3 Qt5 (PyQt5) Tutorial

Qt is a robust cross-platform framework that works on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and more. It allows you to create GUI applications as well as provides libraries for networking,

In this tutorial, we will focus on some of the very core aspects of using PyQt5 and how to package it for distribution.

Here is an example project I created using Pyqt5: https://github.com/DevDungeon/PyQt5-Bitcoin-Price-Checker and the live coding of that project https://www.devdungeon.com/content/live-coding-pyqt5-guis-w-python.

PyInstaller Tutorial

PyInstaller can be used to create .exe files for Windows, .app files for Mac, and distributable packages for Linux. Optionally, it can create a single file which is more convenient for distributing, but takes slightly longer to start because it unzip itself.

This tutorial walks through the process of installing and using PyInstaller to create distributable packages.

VirtualBox Disk Encryption Tutorial

VirtualBox allows you to encrypt the virtual disk files at the VM level. This means you can use VirtualBox to encrypt the disks even if the operating system you are installing does not support disk encryption or you simply prefer not to use something like LVM disk encryption. One benefit of doing this is that you can still use dynamically expanding disks. If you choose an encrypted LVM disk, you can end up with the maximum size of the virtual disk being used which is highly inefficient for disk space.

Advertisement

Advertisement