Category: Tech

Macbook sd card reader always in read-only mode

Most of the time when I insert an SD card into the slot on my mid-2014 Macbook Pro, it mounts in read-only mode and I don’t notice until I try to delete a file. When that happens, the option to “Move to Trash” is missing. After checking that the tiny sliding switch on the side

Monitor load in the terminal

Just a small one that tends to get my attention when I have a terminal open into a remote machine and would like to notice right away when the load rises. Of course one could just use the echo -e "\a" if you have visual bell enabled or if you want to annoy people around

Prolong the life of the SD card in your Raspberry Pi

The web is littered with stories of people who love their Raspberry Pis but are disappointed to learn that the Pi often eats the SD card. I’ve recovered a card once, but otherwise had a few that have been destroyed and were not recoverable. I’ll lay out how I use This One Weird Trick(tm), ahem,

kworker using cpu on an otherwise idle system

I have an old thin client that I upgraded to a home server by adding some additional RAM and storage. I noticed after a recent kernel upgrade that the system seemed sluggish at times, despite doing nothing in particular at the time. top showed that a kworker process was using CPU, not all of it,

Finding how much time Apache requests take

When a request is logged in Apache’s common or combined format, it doesn’t actually show you how much time each request took to complete. To make reading logs a bit more confusing, each request is logged only once it’s completed. So a long-running request may have an earlier start time but appear later in the

Default route via VPN while keeping LAN & services available

OpenVPN is working great and all, but I was having trouble getting my other LAN hosts to connect to the OpenVPN client system (a Raspberry Pi) while also keeping the services I normally run on it available from the internet. On the remote server, I was using redirect-gateway def1, which works but makes some assumptions

Keep getting logged out from Selfoss on Debian

I’m running Selfoss RSS reader and loving it! One thing I don’t love is that it logs me out frequently (BTW, I’m running Apache php-fpm on Debian Jessie). But I think I found a solution. Try adding this to a file called .user.ini in the document root of Selfoss: [crayon-64cebbe25717f269421216/] The 604800 means one week.

Allowing bookmarklets to work while NoScript is enabled

The NoScript extension is fantastic at enhancing one’s security while browsing. Sure, it’s a bit of pain to get used to needing to allow scripts for new websites visited (temporarily or permanently). But I wanted to use bookmarklets to post selected stuff in my Dokuwiki with the dokubookmark plugin. The problem was, every time I

Tunnelblick disconnect fails to remove route

Tunnelblick is an awesome OpenVPN client, which I have been using a lot lately on my Mac. I had a problem where it would connect the first time just fine, but then would never reconnect; it would seem to hang while trying to handshake with the server. I could get it to work again if

scary rando stuff

You don’t see stuff like this everyday (I hope). [crayon-64cebbe2578a4680786041/] [crayon-64cebbe2578ac466717311/]

LFD stops logging to kern.log

It took a while before I figured out why LFD wasn’t logging any issues to kern.log on my Debian-based systems. I realized at some point that it worked when I first installed CSF, but then logged nothing after the first day.

Rename and Iconv are like Chocolate and Peanut Butter

The features of iconv are probably built into Perl rename (aka prename), but when I tried the example from the man page, it kept generating an error message. I presume this is due to a missing Perl module. Here’s the error: [crayon-64cebbe257ae2217593537/] So I suppose if we don’t care much about speed then we can

Fix Bad Firefox URL Suggestions

Firefox URL suggestions are usually very helpful and a real time-saver. But I’ve been rather annoyed for quite a while at some of the suggestions that Firefox proposes while auto-filling the URL bar. There is one case in particular that never made sense to me.

Speed of the sort command

GNU sort is normally crazy fast at what it does. However, recently I was trying to sort & unique several huge files and it seemed to be taking way too long. I did a little googling, and realized that it takes a lot longer to sort the full range of Unicode characters because it has

Moving Evernote notes into WordPress

proprietary insecurity I’ve accumulated many notes (2000+) in Evernote over the years, and love that it can store binary attachments such as images or other media files. My favorite feature is the Evernote Web Clipper browser extension; it does a fantastic job at saving the parts of an article I want to save while keeping