UPDATE - 20170302 - Added Firefox plugin for the Internet Archive.
UPDATE - 20170205 - Added Chrome plugin for the Internet Archive.
Note: This article is aimed at people all across the spectrum of levels of experience with computers. You might see a lot of stuff you already know; then again, you might learn one or two things that hadn't showed up on your radar yet. Be patient.
In George Orwell's novel 1984, one of his plot points of the story was something called the Memory Hole. They were slots all over the building in which Winston Smith worked, into which documents which the …
Not too long ago, when the USB key I'd built a set-top media machine died from overuse I decided to rebuild it using Arch Linux with Kodi as the media player. The trick, I keep finding every time, lies in getting Kodi to start up whenever the machine starts up. I think I've re-figured that out six or seven times by now, and each time after it works I forget all about it. So, I guess I'd better write it down for once so that I've got a snapshot of what I did in case I need to do it …
EDIT: 20170123 - My reviewers have suggested some edits to the article, many of which I've applied.
It's been a while since I wrote a Huginn tutorial, so let's start with a basic one to get you comfortable with the idea of building an agent network. This agent network will run every half hour, poll a REST API endpoint, and e-mail you what it gets. You'll have to have access to an already running Huginn instance that can send outbound e-mail. This post is going to be kind of lengthy, but that's because I'm laying out some fundamentals. Once you understand …
Since PivotX went out of support I've been running the Bolt CMS for my website at Dreamhost (referral link). A couple of weeks back you may have noticed some trouble my site was having, due to my running into significant difficulty encountered when upgrading from the v2.x release series to the v3.x release series. Some stuff went sideways, and I had to restore from backup at least once before I managed to get the upgrade procedure straightened out with the help of some of the developers in the Bolt IRC channel on Freenode. If it wasn't for help …
20170107: It's not "group name" it's "Group ID." I don't know how to find that yet.
The communications program Signal by Open Whisper Systems is unique in several respects. Firstly, its barrier to entry is minimal. You can search for it in the Google Play online store or Apple iOS appstore and it's waiting there for you at no cost. Second, it's designed for security by default, i.e., you don't have to mess around with it to make it work, and it does does the right thing automatically and enforces strong encryption by default (unlike a lot of personal …
A couple of weeks ago my webhosting provider sent me a polite e-mail to inform me that I was using too much disk space. A cursory examination of their e-mail showed that they were getting upset about the daily backups of my site that I was stashing in a hidden directory, and they really prefer that all files in your home directory be accessible. I ran a quick check and, sure enough, about twenty gigabytes times two weeks of daily backups adds up to a fair amount of disk space. So, the question is, how do I keep backing up …
A couple of days ago I got it into my head to upgrade one of my Exocortex servers from Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS, the latest stable release. While Ubuntu long-term support releases are good for a couple of years (14.04 LTS would be supported until at least 2020) I had some concerns about the packages themselves being too stale to run the later releases of much of my software. To be more specific, I could continue to hope that the Ruby and Python interpreters I have installed could be upgraded as necessary but at …
In my last post I said that I'd describe in greater detail how to set up the software that I use as the core of my exocortex, called Huginn.
First, you need someplace for the software to live. I'll say up front that you can happily run Huginn on your laptop, desktop workstation, or server so long as it's not running Windows. Huginn is developed under Linux; it might run under one of the BSDs but I've never tried. I don't know if it'll run as expected in MacOSX because I don't have a Mac. If you want to give …
A while ago I did the usual song-and-dance with the California DMV to renew the registration of my vehicle, as one does periodically. Due to the fact that I live in a fairly high-infrastructure area (not quite New York City, but certainly not as underdeveloped as Pittsburgh or the part of the DC metropolitan complex I used to reside in are in this respect) it's actually kind of rare that I need to actually drive anywhere. If I can't walk to it in half an hour or therabouts I can take BART and not think much of it (usually because …
If you've been experimenting with different operating systems for a while, or you have some need to run more than one OS on a particular desktop machine, chances are you've been playing around with Oracle Virtualbox due to its ease of use, popular set of features, flexibility, and cost. You've also probably run into the following syndrome (usually while trying to build a new virtual machine):
You configure a new virtual machine.
You associate a bootable optical disk image with the new VM (for the sake of argument, let's say you're experimenting with the 50 megabyte(!) distro Damn Small Linux …
