Elk

I wrote a tool that uses dbus to get usb device details. You can use USB keys to lock/unlock the screensaver. Linux only atm but the framework for osx and win is there. Maybe you can find some useful stuff in there for your project https://github.com/Svenito/usblock

That's not Python's fault, that's just people using the wrong tool for the job. I'm probably going over old material, but coding is more than just knowing how to code. Part of it is knowing what to use when. Much like a worksman knows which specific screwdriver, plane or chisel is right for the current task, a programmer knows what language is the right one for the job. Although I am curious why you say perl is simpler than python? You state that "perl would suffice", but I'd say that perl/python aren't as far apart as python/bash. Are you talking about things like regex handling in perl which don't require a separate module?

http://www.proxclone.com/reader_cloner.html might this work too? And this, just because I like the idea and has a bit more info on the RFID protocol http://www.bishopfox.com/resources/tools/rfid-hacking/attack-tools/

http://www.tweaknews.eu formerly astraweb.com formerly http://giganews.com

seems to simply be GeoIP (unless they are omitting some information) http://www.bbc.co.uk/help/site_versions.shtml My guess is that the TOR routes might cause their localisation to report a non-uk address - perhaps something that remains in the header or perhaps might be missing from it? Or perhaps it's related to https://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/tv/incorrect_location_may2014 I would try a VPN - or if you have a access to a box in the UK, see if that works (i.e. not a TOR relay)

I assume you mean labs as in a set of systems you can practice hacking on? www.hacking-lab.com provides online hacking challenges. These cover OWASP challenges (which are a bit old, but still provides the basics) and their own creations which are various. Plus Hackyeaster is always fun :) Other alternatives are www.smashthestack.org http://overthewire.org/wargames/ which are more wargames than labs. You could also download vulnerable ISOs and run these in virtualbox and set up your own lab.

I've had success setting up bootable USBs with this http://penguintosh.com/

I have/do run (dualboot) Linux Mint on all my Macs and it works fine. Being Ubuntu based you should be fine. I have had to jump some hoops for things like keyboard light and screen brightness on my Macbook Pro, but it all depends on your hardware etc. The touchpad needed a little tweaking to make a little less sensitive, but all in all you can install and boot up to a working system without having to do too much configuring.

Python on a Mac... I've had my share of headaches with that. You can just move/copy the pip installed modules to the other directory (Check the directories first in case some stuff might get overwritten). cp -r /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/* /Users/myname/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages or use rsync rsync -azrv /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages /Users/myname/Library/Python/2.7/ The advantage of rsync are that you won't overwrite exisiting files that are identical as they won't be copied. If the files differ however then they will be overwritten, so make sure there's no special version of a module in the user directory first. The flags mean: a - archive mode r - recursive v - verbose z - compress during transfer (may not need that) or just use `pip remove <package>` to delete them and re-install later. To change the install path of the packages for pip use the -t, --target <dir> flag when you run the install Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a global config file for pip, so you'll have to add that flag each time.

Nice. I like that it's like a twitter-ticker stream. Much prefer the non-curses approach. Just plain ol text streamed down. If you want to interact with Twitter from the commandline here's a python client I contributed to a while back https://github.com/c0ding/tweetuoso if you are interseted.

Aside from being an easy to understand high level language, it also comes with a large number of modules that will do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Less time spent re-inventing the wheel or coding tool libraries that you need to get a different job done. Most of them also come without a massive dependency headache. Some reasons why Python is becoming more popular (IMHO): Computer have gotten faster so the overhead of an interpreted language is less of a problem The people who grew up with the language are getting jobs and exposing it to others Lots more modules have been written and web development with python is getting more popular The scientific community love it for its simplicity, speed and that it allows for quick iteration during development (numpy, scipy etc) Guido is a charmer :) With things like Cython and JIT coming along in leaps and bounds, the speed gap between compiled and interpreted languages is narrowing. I guess *coughperlcough* was once the Python but it wasn't as approachable as Python, which probably sealed its fate. The only big new thing you might want to look at it Python3 and what's different with that. People are still divided over whether 3 is better than 2 or not, but it depends on what you are doing with it I guess.

Well first off that's now how you use regex: import re my_string = 'Test string to parse' #Either pre-compile the regex if you are going to reuse it regex = re.compile('Test') m = regex.match(my_string) # Or just use a regex once m = re.match('test', my_string) but apart from that you do not want to be parsing HTML with regular expressions. Take a look at http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ which will make your life a lot easier.