Category: Tech

VX ConnectBot

I had been using ConnectBot for a long time on my Android devices, because I wanted something to remotely administer machines without needing an actual laptop. It’s nice because the data plan is built-in to most mobiles, so one doesn’t necessarily need a wifi connection nearby. Unfortunately, it’s rather time-consuming and clumsy to use an

Probable compiler bug on Raspberry Pi

I was messing around with Varnish on my Pi and was a little peeved that it kept crashing right after start up. Turns out, this issue is well known to the Googles and everyone who’s tried to run it on the Pi, or at least on Raspbian like I am. If you try running Varnish

Just a little panicked

I nearly lost data permanently last night while trying to merge master and dev branches in my web server’s document root. Thankfully I had a not-so-recent backup that included all the uploaded media that I’d intentionally excluded from the git repo. Seems all is well now, but like every technology, Git is both wonderful and

Faster webserver on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi has a 32-bit ARM CPU running at 700MHz by default, although you can usually overclock them somewhat and still enjoy stable behavior. I’m running Raspbian, a Debian-based distribution built for the Pi. One thing that’s mildly annoying is that running WordPress on the Pi using Nginx and php-fpm has been dog slow,

glances

Great write up on the glances utility over here. [crayon-64cebc2b69b3a903214629/]

enabled SSL/TLS on devolve

Big thanks to StartSSL for getting me set up with a signed certificate. Their FAQ on configuring with openssl and nginx worked like a charm. I even got a handy email from them after I thought I was done, telling me that I needed to concatenate the certificate they gave me with a sub cert

climagic is magic

If you’re not following @climagic, you should be forced to listen to this for hours on end: [crayon-64cebc2b69dda711913179/] That’s just one of the many glorious bits from this timeline.

Commafeed UI tweak

If you’re not using Commafeed, (and really, why aren’t you) and you like web-based feed readers, you should check it out – it’s pretty great. There is one UI flaw that bugged me with the latest commit I grabbed today: the left sidebar with the list of feeds was too wide. Luckily, Commafeed makes it

Overturn ECPA Now

UPDATE: We made it! As of right now, there are 105,628 signatures on the petition. Thank you! Can’t wait to hear what the white house says on this. Please sign this petition! I’m having trouble believing that it’s taken this long for people to take a minute to sign it. Is the level of apathy

Check certificates for known weak entropy

On Ubuntu/Debian, you can sudo apt-get install openssl-blacklist.Then just run the following: [crayon-64cebc2b6a219765441656/] The last line of output is the most important; It should read “not blacklisted.” :-)

Locamatic – automatic Mac location changer

UPDATE: locamatic is not maintained anymore as far as I can tell. Check out my post on a replacement: ControlPlane Glad I found Locamatic, because I need to set different network location profiles on my Mac based on where I am in order for the network to function properly. It works by checking which wifi

Google’s Octane 2 Scores

Google released version 2.0 of their Octane browser / js benchmark. I decided to run it against my installed browsers Firefox, Safari and Chrome. IE is missing here since I’m running a Mac. Here are the results for the browsers on my machine (higher score is better):

sed is great, but not that great

TIL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1103149/non-greedy-regex-matching-in-sed It turns out, sed has no concept of a non-greedy match. You have to use perl or some other advanced tool to get that regex feature. The workaround given at Stack Overflow only works if you have a single character ending match delimiter (in this case, it was [^/]+ to match until the

monkeysphere project to add PKI to all the services

looks pretty cool. This project claims to want to apply the PKI web-of-trust to different services like web browsing and SSH. By querying the public keys stored on key servers, you wouldn’t need to guess that the remote site was providing their actual key the first time you connect, like you normally would when connecting

Seeing HTTP headers that a browser won’t show you

I learned today that tools like Firebug won’t display the headers on a file that would normally be downloaded (as opposed to say, displayed in a browser). The solution? The command line, of course. I wanted to make sure a web server was setting the right MIME type for an mp4 video. curl -I http://path.to/videos/vid.mp4