A collection of #nerdtips made on Twitter. This list will keep growing.
The find command
A quick Parman #NerdTip for the day.
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) February 9, 2025
The find command on Unix systems (Linux and Mac) is super powerful and hard to learn which had put me off initially – but you don't need to know all that to get a lot out of it. Just know something very basic, and add to the options at your…
The grep and the pipe symbol
Parman's nerd tips…
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) November 29, 2024
I want to tell you about grep and the pipe symbol, |.
Grep is a free, simple, and powerful command line search function that's available on every OS. The syntax…
grep "string" file
This is the simplest form, which prints to the screen, every entire…
DIY QR codes
Did you know you can make a QR code on your computer from the command line fairly easily? Parman's #NerdTips …
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) February 4, 2025
Step 1 – Install Parmanode on Mac or Linux (or update to 3.52.1)
Step 2 – From the main menu, select "t" for tools, "n" for the next page, then "qr" for the menu (if…
Virtual drives with dd
Mini tutorial on creating virtual drives (.img files), follow along, it'll be fun 😜
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) January 17, 2025
You need a Linux computer. A ParmanodL is best (😘). If you use Mac, you can use Parmanode to install ParmaBox, then the Linux commands will work in that.
Sorry, there was a lot of Parma this…
SSH into your node 😂
More sexy nerd tips by Parman…
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) November 26, 2024
If you have multiple computers in your network, you probably know you can manage them all from one machine using SSH.
But it's bloody annoying typing in the password every time, so do this…
On the FROM computer, make sure you have SSH keys.…
<control> r command search
Parman's nerd tips…
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) November 19, 2024
In you're repeating commands in terminal that take a long time to type, you can hit control-r to search for a previous command, start typing some unique part of the text, it'll pop up, and hit enter to execute.
If it's not unique, after typing, hit…
Open
Parman's sexy nerd tips…
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) November 26, 2024
If you're navigating the file system with command line like a boss, Linux or Mac, you can actually quickly switch to graphical interface with "open". Eg
open /home/favourite_porn/
or the current directory…
open ./
Of note for beginners, " . "…
Hex dumps
Parman's #NerdTips on Hex dumps (The Cancellor on the brink text) …
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) January 23, 2025
A hex dump is the contents of a file (its bytes) represented in human-readable format (rather than 0's and 1's).
xxd is a GNU program (Linux and Mac have it) that can read data in a file directly, even if…
Netcat Chat Server
Parman #nerdtips again, this one is super cool.
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) February 24, 2025
You can easily DIY a two-way chat between any two terminals. To keep it simple, let's do it on the same computer to simulate they are two…
Open two terminals in Mac or Linux.
Make sure you have 'netcat' installed…
which nc…
Github
Time for another Parman #nerdtip…
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) March 25, 2025
Have you ever cloned a repository from GitHub? It's a superpower and it goes like this:
Definitions first…
[[
– Clone means copy exactly
– Repo/repository is a directory with stuff in it
– ~ means home directory, typically /home/username
-…
Python http server
Another Parman's #NerdTips episode.
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) May 17, 2025
Your computer surely has python installed. This will work on Linux and Mac, and probably Windows. Follow along…
Open Terminal and change to a directory that has some pictures in it. If you don't know what "change to a directory" means,…
Easy way to run Tailscale…
Another of Parman's sexy #NerdTips rant, adding to the list at https://t.co/84dqCp2gn0 https://t.co/GKOzpVUU8j
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) May 28, 2025
SSL connections with wallets…
Parman's #NerdTips
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) June 15, 2025
When you connect your Sparrow wallet to your electrum server on a DIFFERENT computer by SSL, typically, you're going to have a rough time.
Read on for a good time…
With TCP (unencrypted), it usually works fine. And TCP is not actually a problem per se, if…
Diffie Hellman explanation (the best one;)
Quick easy explanation of Diffie Helman, the most common underlying technology behind secure communication between computers over the internet…
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) October 3, 2025
You know how with public/private key cryptography used in Bitcoin, you take a secret number (your private key), and multiply it by a…
Base64 encoding/decoding
Parman's #nerdtips
— Parman 🔑 Bitcoin Self-Custody Mentor (@parman_the) November 7, 2025
Do you want to know why a lot of base64 numbers (not all) end with = or ==?
This might seem boring, but explaining it covers a lot of interesting things (also, I'm assuming you know what base64 is, but I will take requests to explain that another time).
The…