Blog on passthejoe

Evangelina Mascardi plays Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major BWV 998 on the Baroque lute

Fri, 02 May 2025 03:00:00 -0700

When installing ufw closes all the ports

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0700

There comes a time in my setup of a Linux/Unix system where I want to tinker with the firewall. And I usually install ufw — the “Uncomplicated Firewall” to do it. It’s not complicated, and I like that.

But if you have existing services running on your server or workstation that you installed with a Linux package manager such as apt or dnf/yum, you have to remember to reopen all the ports you need, because the installation of ufw on most systems closes all of those ports.

GNOME Software was pretty much freezing in Debian 12. Here's how I fixed it

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 03:45:00 -0800

My 2011 iMac 27-inch running Debian 12 (upgraded since 10) was having an issue with GNOME Software. The app would start, but it would “spin” forever, never allowing me to add, remove or update software.

A quick search produced this fix, which worked immediately:

To fix Gnome Software getting stuck with “Software catalog is being loaded” being shown, kill the application and remove its cache using these two commands:

$ killall gnome-software
$ rm -rf ~/.cache/gnome-software

Then restart GNOME Software. It works!

After self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, I'm back on a free VPS

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 07:45:00 -0800

My time hosting a web server on a Raspberry Pi in the coat closet has come to an end. I’m not unhappy. I don’t need to be inviting ports 80 and 443 into my home network. It was just an experiment. One that went really well.

But I’m OK moving on.

When the self-hosting experiment began with my first Raspberry Pi (a Zero W that was not up to the task), I was surprised to find out that I could use my Spectrum-supplied Arris cable modem/router to open ports 80 and 443 and forward them to a computer on my local network.

A tribute to the Chicago Manual of Style (while mostly mentioning the AP Stylebook)

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:46:46 -0700

I’m not a Chicago Manual of Style editor, though I could be.

Coming up in the world of journalism, the bible is the AP Stylebook, and I probably used it 20 times a day at one point. Eventually you remember what’s in there and can quote passages from memory. This was in the days before the Web took over, and we had reference books, physical clips of old newspapers and a telephone. (When we couldn’t figure something out, we’d make a call.)

This is a test entry

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 07:56:01 -0700

Can you see this blog entry?

There is a picture of a Raspberry Pi 4 in the case above.

A new Ruby-based static-site generator from Shinobi creator Bradley Taunt

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 07:56:01 -0700

I wasn’t expecting a new static-site generator from Bradley Taunt, who created Shinobi, but I should have expected it because he has written a lot of short blog-generating scripts, as he details in Blogging for 7 years

He left Shinobi behind a few years ago. I don’t begrudge him that — it remains good to use and will continue to be so. Shibobi has issues for sure — the biggest being that it doesn’t support inline links or other HTML because it uses XML for web display.

Hugo in OpenBSD in 2024

Mon, 13 May 2024 19:19:14 -0700

Am I playing with lukewarm fire by syncing my Hugo blog files across Linux and OpenBSD systems and attempting to publish from both?

Maybe it’s my aging theme, but the Hugo binary in OpenBSD threw a whole bunch of errors when I created the file for this post.

If you see this, call the experiment cautiously successful.

OpenBSD seems to run even better in the 7.5 release

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:32:34 -0700

I am not sure if I’m imagining it, but OpenBSD seems to run better on my 2017 HP Envy laptop on the 7.5 release than it did on 7.3 and 7.4.

I don’t know if the project made improvements in the way it runs on my Intel Core i7 7th Gen CPU (and the on-chip Intel GPU), but it seems like things are quieter in terms of the CPU load as seen in htop, the frequency with which the fans spin up and how cool (to the touch) the laptop feels.

Terminal — the Hugo theme used by this blog — is no longer being maintained

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:43:43 -0800

Every time I come back to Hugo as a static-site/blog generator after a long layoff, I look at all the themes available at https://themes.gohugo.io, and since I’m thinking about starting some new sites, I went back to see how my current favorite theme, Terminal (used by this site), was doing.

It still looks great but was “retired” by its developer Radosław Kozieł about 7 months ago.

Since I don’t update the Hugo binary very often (I tend to download it to my working directory instead of using “distro” Hugo), I didn’t notice any problems — mostly because there aren’t any.

Standard Ebooks runs everything on a 2 GB VPS with no database and almost no JavaScript

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 09:38:16 -0800

How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web

They’re keeping the tech simple. They build ebooks and then distribute them.

One single-core server hosts all of their Git repos, builds their ebooks and serves their web site.

Alex Cabal says the web site runs on a “classic LAP stack.” It’s missing the “M,” meaning no MySQL — and no database at all.

What's the difference between blogging and a longer social post?

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:53:53 -0800

There’s a certain lack of permanence to social media posts – in my mind, anyway.

In some cases that’s a feature, but due to the ease of writing in this medium, it’s so easy to just open an app window, write a few lines and hit send. I haven’t published a “real” blog post in months.

I’ve written before about how I would create blog posts more often if doing it was as easy as creating a social post. I even have a script that makes it easy-ish to rsync my Hugo blog, but the Fediverse has such great tools (like Tusky, Semaphore and the new Elk.

How hard is it to move a Hugo setup from one computer to another?

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 20:48:34 -0800

I’ve done a lot of operating system switching over the past many months and not a whole lot of blogging. My question: Does this thing still work?

It’s not a terrible question. I’m maybe four complete OS changes away from the last time I really used this system, and now I’m on immutable/atomic Fedora Silverblue, yet the Hugo binary I stashed with this blog’s source still seems to work.

But will all of my scripts get this post to the live site? If you see this, it worked.

I love a quiet laptop

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:02:19 -0700

I love a quiet computer. That’s one of the great appeals of the Raspberry Pi. No fans, no spinning drives. If only they had enough power to really do desktop things.

I’ve never experienced a Pi “bigger” than a Zero W version 1.1, so I don’t have enough information.

And like most people who still use “real” computers that aren’t smartphones, I do most of my computing on a laptop. And that laptop has an x86_64 (in my case Intel) processor.

Friction in the Hugo composition process — Part 1

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:11:00 -0800

I would write more, I say, if it was easier to start, write and publish a blog entry.

I have a Bash script that allows me to easily write and publish microblog-style entries. Maybe I should come up with something similar for Hugo. It’s been on my to-do list.

I can write tweets quickly. But a Hugo blog entry is a different thing.

There’s a bunch of metadata at the top of the post. You need a title, time and date, author name and Twitter handle field. I guess I can forget about that last one in the Elon era. And then there are tags. And I can choose, post by post, whether to show the full post in the index, or not. There’s an optional description that makes the blog listing pages look much better. You have to come up with a file name.

You really need to set rsslimit in your Hugo config file

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 17:02:27 -0800

I use Hugo to automatically build two sites that pull XML feeds from the CentOS project whenever there are updates to the Stream 8 and Stream 9 Linux distributions. The entries tend to be long, but they are all text, and the great thing is that the blog tends to run itself.

I was having trouble with IFTTT, which I use to post the new entries to Twitter, and I found that the XML out of Hugo was sluggish.

You need a good wire stripper

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 03:00:01 -0700

I’ve never had a good wire stripper. Yes I’ve used my teeth, which I don’t recommend.

I picked this one up for $7.20 at All Electronics and quickly set the screw for the 22 gauge wire I’m working with.

It really works. It can even strip the cloth wire I bought from StewMac.

This makes working with wire so much easier. The comments at All Electronics say the tool hard to adjust, but I had no trouble loosening the screw with a flat-head screwdriver and setting it. And at around $7, if if ever loses its sharpness, I won’t hesitate to get a new one.

Playing the guitar — no pressure

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 17:16:17 -0700

If things don’t get too crazy on any given day, I get back to our garage-turned-office and play the guitar a bit. It could be 15 minutes. Sometimes a half-hour.

And I want to get back there. I think I’ve built a habit. Like I said in my last post on this topic, I don’t have a lot of structure or focus. I play what I want.

Often that’s working my way through standard tunes. Lately it’s been “Waltz for Debby,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” and “All the Things You Are.”

Debian 11 on a Mid-2011 Apple iMac 27-inch

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 16:59:21 -0700

An Apple Mid-2011 iMac 27-inch “Core i5” 2.7 fell into my lap some time around 2017, and even though it had a few years of MacOS support ahead, it was slow — never mind the 20 GB of RAM I added when supporting it for an Adobe Creative Cloud workflow.

Booting took forever. Updates took forever. Saving an inDesign document took … you guessed it. A lot of spinning beach balls. (You know when I get spinning beach balls in Linux? NEVER.)

Goodbye CentOS Stream 8. I guess we didn't click.

Mon, 09 May 2022 04:25:16 -0800

Writer’s note on March 3, 2024: I think I took this post off my CentOS blog at some point because it might have been too “mean,” or maybe just too “critical.” I felt bad. Being the bull in Red Hat’s CentOS china shop wasn’t a fun role. Since this post was first written, CentOS 9 has been released and feeding into RHEL 9 for some time. I think the way it still goes is that development happens in Stream 9 and then moves to RHEL 9. But critical security patches begin in RHEL 9 and eventually make their way to Stream 9. I’m not sure if there is a regular cadence, but the evidence of patches — especially to Stream’s Linux kernel — really only exists in the changelogs on commits in the CentOS Stream Gitlab.

I try to play the guitar every day

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 19:59:59 -0800

I didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. I just wanted to get my hands on the guitar. I didn’t set any goals, though I do have them. I just want to play.

I split my time between classical music, jazz standards and improvisation. I want to learn standard tunes — the melody and harmony — and be able to play over them. I work on my classical technique. If I really concentrated, I could develop something resembling a classical repertoire.

Not a review of CentOS Stream 8

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 12:00:12 -0700

I have so many notes. I started running CentOS Stream 8 five months ago, and I wanted to document every win, loss, setback and solution as I tried to make what isn’t really a desktop distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its clones) — into my laptop operating system.

I’m not going to look at my notes. This non-review won’t write itself, and the notes aren’t going to do it for me.

The 2021 Linux laptop rebuild

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 14:59:33 -0700

CentOS Stream 8 — a controversial yet boring Linux — would be my new operating system

After holding up due to indecision, I went ahead with the Linux laptop rebuild.

I decided to give CentOS Stream 8 a try. It’s a “hot” Linux distro. But for all the wrong reasons. I can say now that it’s technically excellent, with the extremely notable exception of an error in the Boot ISO (yes, I filed a bug) that makes it impossible to proceed before figuring out and manually entering a URL for a working mirror and then a regression in Mutter that killed Files/Nautilus for a day or so until I figured out a workaround. (Developers sent a new package soon thereafter.)

Pausing the Linux rebuild

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 16:48:56 -0700

I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell.

But I decided to press “pause.”

I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.

Backups in Linux: I keep it simple

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 15:55:35 -0700

The next step in putting a new hard drive into my laptop is to make a full backup of the /home files. I haven’t done a full-image Clonezilla-style backup in a long, long time, and I do recommend it it you have a spare drive and a lot of spare time.

Instead I just back up my user files. I have two working Linux computers right now, and if I need to rebuild one, I can do a reinstall and get my preferred applications set up fairly quickly.

Reinstalling a Linux computer system: Step by step

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:39:10 -0700

I’m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15.

Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need.

I’m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster — if the laptop isn’t ready right away, I’ll still be able to work.

The new Debian Bullseye desktop background just moved onto systems

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 04:48:45 -0800

The new desktop background image for Debian Bullseye/Testing (the future Debian 11) appeared on my system last night in the updates.

It’s another in the hundreds (and probably thousands) of steps leading up to Bullseye becoming Debian GNU/Linux’s stable release later this year — sometime around July if the recent pattern holds.

If you're worried about losing Google Sync in Chromium, you might as well use Chrome

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 16:43:50 -0800

I’m a hypocrite.

I use the Chromium browser packaged by the Debian Linux distribution.

I also use Google’s sync service for my bookmarks.

By using the open-source (yet Google controlled) Chromium instead of the proprietary Chrome (which is based on Chromium), I fool myself into thinking I’m adhering to some kind of software freedom principles.

I don’t want Google “spying” on me, so I don’t use Google Chrome, which could be a black box doing all sorts of horrible things for Google’s benefit.

I'm not opposed to nonfree firmware in Debian, but I removed it, and my laptop still runs fine

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 12:18:29 -0800

The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from the depths of the debian-devel mailing list under the title “Making Debian available.”

The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to pull it into the 21st century is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its standard install images do not include nonfree firmware, and installations on most laptops will go poorly because the Linux kernel and free firmware might not support their WiFi or display systems.

Ruby gems: Using Linux/BSD packages vs. gem install

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 16:06:15 -0800

As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer.

The problem is that every distribution and project packages a different subset of all the Ruby gems available.

I’ve always tried to use as many “packaged” gems as possible in the systems I run — chiefly Debian and Fedora Linux, along with OpenBSD.

Why CentOS Stream and the end of CentOS Linux doesn’t really matter

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 17:18:25 -0800

There were clones of — or more accurately downstream projects based on — Red Hat Enterprise Linux before Red Hat bought CentOS in 2014.

CentOS started in 2006, and there have been other distributions based on RHEL. (My favorite is still Nux’s Stella from the CentOS 6 days.)

There are many (many!) other Linux distributions and BSD projects that can supply a server or desktop operating system. Most of them are not owned by corporations that can limit their distribution on a whim. CentOS was a big deal before Red Hat acquired the project in 2014. New projects will now take its place.

CentOS Stream and the end of the CentOS clone: perils, pitfalls, risks and opportunities for Red Hat

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 17:06:24 -0800

Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.

What is CentOS Stream? It is a reimagining of CentOS as a continuously delivered yet version-constrained development distribution that tracks ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 yet stays within the RHEL 8 world from an ABI (Application Binary Interface)-compatibility standpoint.

How this Debian Stable user ended up with Google Chrome from Google’s repository

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 16:52:21 -0800

Update: On Jan. 1, 2021, an updated Chromium package moved into the Debian Stable repository. Hopefully it will also become part of the Testing repo and appear in the next Debian release. The original post follows:

I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn’t fully Googled — was very out of date in the Debian Stable repository.

Vim tip: Open the last file you closed with :e#

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:03:49 -0800

I can’t believe I didn’t learn this earlier because now I do it all the time:

If you close a file, as I often do with :bd, to open the last file you closed, type e# in command mode:

:e#

The last closed file opens in your current window.

This is great for me because in my editing workflow, I have a story budget from one directory in one window, and I work on stories from a different directory in another. So my working directory is the story directory, and I would have to change it to reopen my budget file, which I often close when moving from one computer to another to do a Google Meet (aka Google Zoom) chat and not be too loud for everybody else in the house. (It’s 2020, and we’re quarantining.)

Running four sites on NearlyFreeSpeech.net should cost me $3.92 per month

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 13:16:03 -0800

NearlyFreeSpeech.net stands out among shared-hosting companies for many reasons, but its cost structure is one of the biggest.

NFSN doesn’t charge a flat fee for an “unlimited” number of web sites, or a smaller fee for one or two sites. Instead, NFSN charges for what you use.

Before I committed to switching my sites from Hostgator to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I needed to make sure I wouldn’t be dinged for a Slashdot/Reddit/Hacker News-style traffic spike.

Using rsync to update a Hugo blog

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 15:11:24 -0700

The one disadvantage of a static-site generator like Hugo is that after you create an entry and build your blog locally, you then have to figure out how to update your site on the server. And Hugo seems to change a whole lot of files with every run of the command hugo, even if you are only creating a single entry.

There’s a heavy amount of encouragement to use GitHub to manage the blog and some kind of build utility to transfer the files to the web server.

I got a SinkShroom. Is it worth the money?

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 15:36:53 -0700

I bought this plastic drain stopper called the SinkShroom from Amazon. I removed the original stopper from our sink long ago and have been using another easily removed plastic sink stopper that was supposed to catch hair but never did. It didn’t work too well at all, but it sells for about $8.

The SinkShroom and its bigger cousins the TubShroom and ShowerShroom have a lot of marketing behind them.

Dave Winer is too important to think he's accomplishing nothing

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:27:14 -0700

I read Dave Winer’s Scripting.com blog every day. I subscribe via email. Like everything Dave does, it makes me think.

Today I wonder if I should set up an email subscription service of some kind for this blog. Email is the new hotness in marketing. Email addresses are like gold.

Dave recently wrote about how he feels he’s reaching nobody with his blog, especially as it pertains to the political issues of the day (e.g. coronavirus, the Black Lives Matter movement and Trump).

I love these clean electric guitar sounds

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:57:20 -0700

Electric guitars weren’t invented to make overdriven sounds, though they do excel at that.

Made for electricity — and for the music of the day in the 1950s — the guitars created by Leo Fender’s company are capable of surprisingly sweet sounds that are as much at home in jazz as in country.

I am particular struck by these Songbirds Foundation videos of guitarists playing stellar examples of 1950s Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters through amps that range from vintage Fender to a Dumble.

Writing in git vs. blogging

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:10:21 -0700

Any of us who have been blogging over the past 10 or more years has written hundreds or maybe thousands of posts.

I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple thousand.

But blog writing and other writing are different. A blog tends to say “this is now, things below this are in the past, things above this will appear in the future.”

It’s reverse-chronological. That’s not a horrible thing.

C++ in Vim with two lines in .vimrc

Sat, 23 May 2020 16:55:32 -0700

With inspiration and code from Ankit, I am using Vim to compile and run C++ programs without leaving the editor.

I added these two lines to my .vimrc:

nnoremap <F7> :!g++ -o %:r %<Enter>
nnoremap <F8> :!./%:r<Enter>

I hit F7 to compile the program I’m working on.

F8 runs that program.

This is much simpler than an IDE, and simpler still than Geany, which is pretty simple already.

These lines could be modified to compile and run a Java program, or to just run your code in scripting languages like Ruby, Perl and Python.

Upgrading my now-dying 2012 laptop to Fedora 32 probably won't happen

Sat, 09 May 2020 14:25:37 -0700

My 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop’s keyboard and touchpad are working intermittently. I’ve already replaced the keyboard twice. They are crazy cheap to buy (and also cheap in quality), but I’m tired of doing it. Not sure what is wrong with the touchpad, but it’s about time to cut my losses.

The laptop has run Fedora for a LONG time. It is now on F30. It has gone through many upgrades between about 2013 and 2019. I did a backup and downloaded the Fedora 32 upgrade, but that’s as far as I went. I have all the user files backed up. I could plug in an external keyboard and mouse, and it’ll work fine, but it’s pretty slow. It’s not worth investing in a SATA SSD and is already maxed out at 8 GB of RAM.

Installing OpenBSD on a USB flash drive. Do not recommend.

Sat, 09 May 2020 13:39:17 -0700

My test laptop – a 2012 HP Pavilion g6 – is dying. The past couple of OpenBSD installs resulted in kernel panics, and now the keyboard and touchpad keep failing. I’ve replaced the keyboard twice, and now it’s mostly the ribbon connector between the keyboard and the motherboard.

I have to pop the bottom off the laptop, take out a screw, then pry the keyboard off and re-seat the cable. It’s probably the same kind of thing with the touchpad. And then there are the kernel panics.

The problem with Conexant's Flow.exe and Firefox has been fixed in Windows

Sat, 09 May 2020 13:04:03 -0700

I’m not sure who fixed it, or when, but somebody resolved the issue involving Firefox in Windows 10 laptops from HP and other manufacturers who use the Conexant audio hardware and software.

What happened in my 2017 laptop was that running the Firefox browser would cause a Conexant program called Flow.exe to start using a whole lot of CPU, causing the laptop to run hot – and poorly.

The “fix” at the time was to rename the Flow.exe file as _Flow.exe and ignore the Conexant audio system’s nag about Flow.exe being missing.

It won't cure coronavirus, but LAUSD sweetens your life with the recipe for its famous coffee cake

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 14:36:30 -0700

It’s 2020, and coronavirus has shut down most of the country and the world. Los Angeles Unified School District campuses have been closed for weeks.

Schools are trying to stay relevant and keep students engaged with online lessons. LAUSD doesn’t want parents to forget about them either. With three robocalls a night, how could we? Nobody does robocalls like the LAUSD.

1888 Torres SE 115: A fine example of the maker who set the standard for the classical guitar

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:35:59 -0700

(Thanks to Guitar Salon International for their entry and this photo of the 1888 Torres SE 115)

Between its many hundreds of videos and extremely informative site and blog, Guitar Salon International is doing quite a service for classical guitar players and fans.

Hundreds of historic instruments have passed through the doors of this Santa Monica institution, and this is no exception.

Classical guitar: My nails on March 30, 2020

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 13:45:39 -0700

The whole idea of playing the classical guitar without nails — with just the flesh of the fingers — holds a great deal of appeal for me.

Rob MacKillop’s extensive web site is a great resource — and source of inspiration — for players of (or with) the flesh (of the fingers). His own videos are excellent, as is his touch with the guitar. The history he lays out, of players from the 19th century to the present day, is compelling.

Ruby gtk3 GUI applications ARE cross-platform

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 13:48:05 -0700

I’ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I’ve veered between Tk for Ruby or Python, JavaFX and Qt.

I recently stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby, and I’ve been going through a couple of tutorials in an attempt to figure it out.

Since I’m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I’d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you could run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I’d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.

My 'dynamic' IP is pretty static

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:35:57 -0700

I have been running this web server on a Raspberry Pi Zero W in my coat closet for three months, and my dynamic IP still hasn’t changed.

That’s good because I still haven’t implemented a script to change where my URL points from FreeDNS in the event that my home IP changes. At some point I guess it’ll happen, and the server will be offline until I figure it out.

Or I’ll just sit down some time before then and work out the script …

I've been using Syncthing to mirror files in Linux, Windows, MacOS and OpenBSD, and it's working

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 15:39:51 -0700

Now that I’m running a new Debian 10 Buster laptop and use Dropbox to sync 160 GB of personal files, I have turned to the open-source, Go-coded Syncthing to keep about 500 MB of work-related files mirrored across that Linux laptop, a Windows 7 desktop and a 2011-era iMac desktop.

It’s all pretty much seamless. I have the Syncthing client running on each PC, and I can monitor the “state” of the sync via a web GUI. Syncthing doesn’t consume a lot of CPU, especially when compared with Dropbox, though I’m not syncing anywhere near as much data for business on Syncthing as I am for personal use on Dropbox.

Printing in Debian 10: CUPS isn't in the default desktop if you forget to check the box during installation

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 07:13:18 -0700

I haven’t had the occasion to print anything in Debian 10 Buster in the couple of weeks that I have been running it, but today is the day.

I knew from the release notes that Debian 10 included “driverless” printing, but I couldn’t find any printers in GNOME Setings, even though I have a wireless printer on my local network.

The reason? I didn’t have CUPS. I had forgotten to check the “print server” box during my installation.

Debian 10 Buster with GNOME 3: I didn't expect it to be this fast, but that could be the SSD talking

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 13:30:00 -0700

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.

And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.

WordPress and Disqus in 2019

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:37:43 -0700

WordPress is a vital resource that hasn’t taken undue advantage of its users like other free, hosted services have done. But right now, it’s not for me.

The one thing I miss about blogging with a static-site generator is the lack of native comments. It’s the one thing self-hosted WordPress (aka WordPress.org) gets right.

It’s probably because WP was “doing” comments before Twitter and Facebook came along. Back then, social was comments.

Google Cloud nuked the web server on my VM

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:07:01 -0700

I wasn’t paying for my Google Cloud VM, and it turns out the price was right.

Since I started working on my own server in the coat closet, I haven’t been using my free Google VM.

I got an email today saying that it’s been 120 days since I’ve opened Google Cloud Shell. If I didn’t log in, “in 7 days, your Cloud Shell home directory will be automatically scheduled for deletion.”

I'm using the Pixyll theme in Hugo

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 16:03:35 -0700

The hardest part about starting a new Hugo site isn’t getting the Hugo program to run. In Windows that part’s easy. All you do is download a binary, unzip and run it.

I have been a new user of Hugo at least three times in the past few years. I’ve never stuck with it. Every time, the initial pain point is finding a theme that a) works, b) has the features I want and c) I can understand and modify where needed.

First post in Hugo for 2019

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:24:29 -0700

It’s been a long time since I messed around with Hugo.

Now I’m thinking it’s time for me to make a real blog with this static-site generator.

Here it is.

Permissions are hard

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:56:40 -0700

Figuring out file and directory permissions on a server is hard.

You have to balance security with functionality. What are the most restrictive permissions you can set and still have everything work?

Shared hosting does take care of a lot for you

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:00:23 -0700

As I build my own server — and this would be the same for a cloud VPS or a local computer, there is a lot to set up and configure.

Shared hosts like NearlyFreeSpeech.net (which I will be using more soon) and Hostgator (which I’ve used for years and will probably be using less) take care of many things in a safe and secure way.

Setting up your own server is very much like reinventing the wheel. It’s better if you like making wheels, have used a lot of wheels, fixed broken ones and rebuilt old ones.

Setting up FTP on my Raspberry Pi

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 18:05:22 -0700

Running your own servers — be they VPSes on Google, AWS or Digital Ocean, or Raspberry Pis in the closet — is a learning experience. You have to put on your sysadmin hat and get to work.

Today I’m trying to figure out the ftp server. I’ve used a hundred of them but never installed and configured one. The hardest part to figure out is the SSL encryption.

If you see this file, it means I’ve made some progress.

Set umask in vsftpd so incoming files have 644 permissions

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:09:18 -0700

If you are setting up an FTP server (I’m using vsftpd in Debian Buster), setting the umask is the way you get incoming files to “take” the right permissions.

For text files, I like the permissions to be 644, which is rw-r--r-- (read-write for user, read for group, read for the world).

To get this in vsftpd, uncomment this line:

local_umask=022

File permissions and ownership that make Ode's Indexette work on a Debian Buster server

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:00:40 -0700

This was easier on Hostgator, where everything is “owned” by my user account and everything works.

To get Ode addins to work, the /data directory is owned by my user and is in the www-data group.

The /data/addins/state directory has the same ownership and permissions (755).

The /data/addins/state/Indexette directory is owned by www-data and is in the www-data group and has permissions 755.

The files created by Indexette in /data/addins/state/Indexette are aux_index_file and primary_index_file. They are owned by www-data and are in the www-data group. Their permissions are 644.

My current fix for the Conexant-Flow.Exe-Firefox issue

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 20:27:13 -0700

The problem for users of Windows laptops using the Conexant audio driver that makes Conexant’s Flow.exe program eat large amounts of CPU when the Firefox web browser is running has not been solved by “conventional” means.

And in order to be part of the “solution,” should one ever come, I filed a bug with Mozilla on the issue.

There have been many fixes proposed for this problem, which only seems to manifest itself on my HP Envy laptop while running Firefox. You hear the fan rev up almost immediately and then can see both Firefox and Flow.exe climb in the amount of CPU they are taking, combining for a total of about 60% on my laptop.

There is an rsync for Windows, and it works

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:34:27 -0800

I’ve been meaning to look into backup solutions for Windows, and while there should eventually be a full Ubuntu Linux shell coming to Windows 10, it’s not there yet unless you tweak things that I can’t ask other users to do.

So I figured that when the Linux shell comes to Windows, I’ll use rsync, the Unix/Linux backup utility I’ve been using for years.

I just found out that there’s already an rsync port to Windows called cwRsync that you can pay for, with a free command-line-only edition available for download.

PulseCaster records both sides of your conversation - and I can confirm that it works

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 20:43:14 -0800

So I’m looking for PulseAudio-related software today, and I come across PulseCaster, a Python application created by former Fedora Project Leader (and current Red Hat employee) Paul Frields.

It’s a simple app. On Linux systems equipped with PulseAudio (which these days is most of them), it will record both sides of a conversation you are having on any application that pushes that audio over PulseAudio. The default is recording both sides of the conversation to a single OGG file. There is an “advanced” setting that records each side of the the conversation as a separate, uncompressed WAV file.

Firefox vs. Chrome on Windows and Linux

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 17:51:06 -0800

I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.

But on my Windows 7 work machine, which is a more powerful (quad-core AMD to my laptop’s dual-core, with 8 GB of RAM to the laptop’s 4 GB), I flip it, using Chrome about 99 percent of the time.

Amazon s3-style storage without Amazon

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:36:51 -0800

Since Amazon has an open API for its s3 Simple Storage Service, other cloud vendors (and even YOU) can spin up a similar service.

Rudy Godoy shows how you can use s3tools in Linux to tap into s3-like services both at Amazon and elsewhere.

Amazon Web Services free for one year

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:07:04 -0800

You can use Amazon Web services free for a year, and I did just that.

I wouldn’t say signing up for Amazon Web Services was easy, or that you don’t need to possess a certain level of geeky experience, because you do. But if you know a minimum about how a Linux server goes together, you can do it.

One thing to note: Ubuntu is HUGE in the world of AWS. This is an area where it looks like they are either dominating, or well on their way to dominating.

When I try to arrange bookmarks in the Chromium or Google Chrome browsers in Debian Wheezy, the app crashes

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:05:09 -0800

Update: I only have this problem with the Chrome/Chromium menu while running the GNOME 3 desktop environment. In Xfce, everything is fine.

The original entry starts here:

I guess I should file a bug report against Chromium in Debian Wheezy about the following:

When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can’t re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.