Chances are you're running one of two major web browsers on the desktop to read my website - Firefox or Google's Chrome.
Chrome isn't bad; I have to use it at work (it's the only browser we're allowed to have, enforced centrally). In point of fact, I'd have switched to it a long time ago if it wasn't for one thing. I make heavy use of a plugin for Firefox called Scrapbook Plus, which make it possible to take a full snapshot of a web page and store it locally so that it can be read offline, annotated, and full-text searched …
Some time ago I wrote an article about what Keybase is and what it's good for. I also mentioned one of my pet peeves, which is that, by default the fonts used by the Keybase desktop client are way, way too small to see easily on Windbringer. A couple of days ago somebody finally figured out how to blow up the fonts on the desktop, so I can finally see what's going on without putting my nose on the display (and making the mouse cursor jump around because Windbringer has a touchscreen). While I wish that this would be a …
EDIT - 20171011 - Added a bit about getting real login shells inside of this Screen session, which fixes a remarkable number of bugs. Also cleaned up formatting a bit.
To keep the complexity of parts of my exocortex down I've opted to not separate everything into larger chunks using popular technologies these days, such as Linux containers (though I did Dockerize the XMPP bridge as an experiment) because there are already quite a few moving parts, and increasing complexity does not make for a more secure or stable system. However, this brings up a valid and important question, which is "How …
A couple of months ago for my Lesser Feast I decided to treat myself to a toy that I've had my eye on for a couple of months: A Pi-Top laptop kit. My fascination with the Raspberry Pi aside (which includes, to be honest, being able to run a rack full of servers in my office without needing to install a 40U rack and a new 220 power feed), it strikes me as being a very useful thing to have under one's desk as a backup deck or possibly a general purpose software development computer. Most laptops have one unique …
We seem to have reached a unique point in history: Available to your average home user are gargantuan amounts of disk space (8 terabyte hard drives are a thing, and the prices are rapidly coming down to widespread affordability) and enough processing power is available for the palm of your hand that makes the computational power that put the human race on the moon compare in the same was that a grain of sand does to a beach. For most people, it's the latest phone upgrade or more space for your media box. For others, though, it poses an unusual …
Let's say that you want to mirror a website chock full of data before it gets 451'd - say it's epadatadump.com. You've got a boatload of disk space free on your Linux box (maybe a terabyte or so) and a relatively stable network connection. How do you do it?
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 …
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 …
Long, long time readers of my blog might remember Leandra, the server that I've had running in my lab in one configuration or another since high school (10th grade, in point of fact). She's been through many different incarnations and has run pretty much every x86 CPU ever made since the 80386. She's also run most of the major distributions of Linux out there, starting with Slackware and most recently running Arch Linux (all of the packages of Gentoo with none of the spending hours compiling everything under the sun or fighting with USE flags). It's also possible to get …
