Category: Tech

Using sSMTP to send to tcp/587

Nearly all the info online is wrong. May 16 14:14:36 xxxxx sSMTP[807358]: Unable to set TLS_CA_FILE=”/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt” If you are relaying to a mail server on port 587, then your ssmtp.conf file should NOT have the line UseTLS=YES. It should have UseSTARTTLS=YES. If you are sending to port 465, then you would want the UseTLS=YES line.

How well different masks work at stopping airborne droplets

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have come up with some creative ways to protect one another from the tiny airborne particles (droplets) that come from our mouths and noses. There are some which are funny, some political, others just making a statement. There are a lot of materials one can use to make their own

Printing to unsupported Brother printer from Chromebook

I was trying to get a printer set up on a Chromebook and after looking through its list for the right model, it wasn’t there. It suggested I give it a PPD file. After some searching, I learned that you can find some compressed PPD files if you download the right Postscript Windows driver from

Trying to find the memory high water mark for a given process

I wanted to find out the most memory a process used while running. ps_mem.py is great for showing the total size (resident + shared) for processes but it’s only an instantaneous snapshot. After some searching, I found out that a tool I’d known about forever already has (mostly) the feature I wanted: /usr/bin/time.

Kids’ Computer Time Keeper for Linux

Sometimes I’m not so great at managing my time. So it makes sense that I’m sometimes not great at managing anyone else’s time either. When it comes to screen time for kids, there needs to be a limit set for how much they use it. We have an Amazon Fire tablet, and it comes with

Everybody Has A Button

If you have any interest whatsoever in government spying / intelligence agencies / counter-intelligence, you should read Schneier’s post and its linked story. Everybody has a button. When Equifax was breached, I assumed it was by a group that just wanted to steal identities for profit. Now that it seems it may have been a

Poor Man’s Continuous Integration

I created the following script which saves a few seconds of switching to a terminal and typing grunt on each change to my source files. [crayon-64cebbd942657658698269/] I can just leave this running in a terminal window and glance at the output to make sure there were no errors.

Reduce PNG sizes from Mac Finder

When I save a screenshot on my systems, it doesn’t try to automatically crush/minify the PNG. Here’s how on a Mac I’ve added a context menu item for images to crush them. This can help save storage space or make web pages load faster. Ensure you have pngquant installed. Other tools may work for you,

Filtering: In or Out, Exclusive or Inclusive and Regular Expressions

My current preferred open source, self-hosted & simple RSS reader is Selfoss. I compared several of these types of RSS readers in a prior post and came to different conclusion, but I’ve been using Selfoss for at least a year now. My having switched to it may have coincided with improvements from the mobile reading

Defend against fake google bots

I can think of some reasons why folks might use the Googlebot user agent on their non-Google bots, but I can’t think of any good, upstanding reasons to do it. Here’s how one might find some fine folks who would do such a thing. As of right now (May 2018), all valid Google Bot source

MemcacheD is your friend

MemcacheD Is Your Friend is an object caching plugin for WordPress that offers faster access to cached objects, especially if your database happens to reside on a different host. The problem this time around is that it scopes some of its members as private, and as a result, is incompatible with some plugins. I’ve run