Updated 26-Sep-2025 A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as a rational expression, is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. See also regex101 for helpful ... Read more
Agrowth: Agrowth ("almost agnostic or atheistic about growth”) is a concept in economic policy according to which it is preferable to be indifferent to the growth of gross domestic product (GDP growth) when devising policies to further economic and societal progress.[1][2] The reasoning behind agrowth is that GDP growth does not correlate closely with such ... Read more
W34/2025: Monday 18 August - Sunday 24 August 2025 Caption: Lovely vinegar Tech Migrating from my *.io domains to *.info which is cheaper and more stable as a generic TLD, and the prices are not becoming ridiculous, as .ios are. Who knows what will happen with the .io tld now that Chagoans (actually, Mauritians) are ... Read more
Updated 23-Aug-2025 This is an ongoing collection of Open Source stuff. Some of this I haven't used but have heard about enough to become interested, and therefore want to keep track of it in some way. Some of this stuff I use daily, and prize highly (some I use daily and prize moderately -- looking ... Read more
Music discovery is kind of an issue. The big streaming companies largely hype the overproduced popular nonsense and don't surface much that is interesting (of course some of that pop music, of whatever genre, is interesting, but it is hard to avoid it and so discovery is not much of an issue for that). Combine ... Read more
W33/2025: Monday 11 August - Sunday 17 August 2025 Caption: Good-sized black scorpion hanging out at night. Tech Heard about Slidev Completed Updated Syncthing to 2.x.x on Debian and Android. Ironed out the installation instructions on Syncthing. Still installing filters on Fail2Ban, and banning more bots Tasks Enable caching on Gcore Install and configure Prosody ... Read more
W32/2025: Monday 04 August - Sunday 10 August 2025 Caption: boys & boba Tech Completed Fail2Ban implemented Next steps: Anubis (and maybe zip bombs) Tasks Syncthing Enable caching on Gcore Install and configure Prosody server for domain: mcneill.io Migrate users from chat.mcneill.im to mcneill.io XMPP Books Wow, lots of interesting books read, they just come ... Read more
Fail2ban is a security service that monitors the logs of common services (usually sshd and nginx). It uses a filter to identify an abnormality, then passes the IP address of the intruder to a firewall program (iptables or ufw, commonly). Files and configuration Install Fail2ban with sudo apt install fail2ban. The context for this configuration ... Read more
W31/2025: Monday 28 July - Sunday 03 August 2025 Caption: Synthetic camera view Tech Completed Cutover to Trixie on five devices (including a server). Cutover to Hetzner (Germany) from Linode (France), this gives me 2x the server resources for the same price. Installed and migrated WordPress installations. Cutover from Cloudflare to Gcore for DNS Tasks ... Read more
W30/2025: Monday 21 July - Sunday 27 July 2025 Caption: boy Tech Tasks Modernize apt sources files. This is the new format. Did this, and updated a bunch of the apt article. Hunt down the annoying bug Warning: https://apt.syncthing.net/dists/syncthing/InRelease: Policy will reject signature within a year, see --audit for details. Fixed this by importing the ... Read more
W29/2025: Monday 14 July - Sunday 20 July 2025 Short note this week. Tech Updated the Kodi article to Nova, as that is what I use at home on Android TV, and on Android mobile devices. Upgraded two servers, one desktop, and one laptop to Debian 13 (Trixie). It will be frozen later this month ... Read more
W28/2025: Monday 07 July - Sunday 13 July 2025 No notes this week.
W27/2025: Monday 30 June - Sunday 06 July 2025 Caption: boy Tech Spent time fixing the Android 15 / One UI 7 update to my Samsung A24 (a great phone), and wrote up Disable One UI 7 Battery Indicator. Samsung, Y U Suck? Spent time lamenting two bugs in Dino, in the Dino XMPP chat. ... Read more
Updated 03-Oct-2025 Note: It's out, and looking good. Backports repositories now available. Trixie is release 13 of Debian GNU/Linux. It will be officially released likely sometime in August. It is common to answer the question: When will Debian (number) be released? with When it is ready. And so, an exact date cannot be predetermined, until ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The venerable Neofetch hasn't been updated since 2020 (and was archived last year). Fastfetch is it's reasonable replacement (with a bit more info). Fastfetch is available in apt repositories and also from the git repository (latest editions). Fastfetch was last updated 18-July-2025 and gets ongoing support. The version in apt lags a bit ... Read more
Updated 19-Apr-2026 See also Samsung buds core bluetooth Android devices Android apps disable One UI 7/8 battery indicator The One UI 7 and One UI 8 battery indicator -- One UI 7 is now available in Asia -- which is part of the Android 15 release for various Samsung devices, in a word, sucks. In ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 W25/2025: Monday 23 June - Sunday 29 June 2025 Caption: Camera view on BYD Dolphin 2024 Tech Tasks Trying out Gcore (to replace Cloudflare) Work Urk Health Finished reading How to Feed the World by Smil. Excellent work. Wrote up a post on Food and supplements which summarizes some of the issues for ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 W25/2025: Monday 16 June - Sunday 22 June 2025 No notes this week, but do have for next week
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Leading with science and medicine, there are only a certain number of supplements that are needed, many of which can be obviated by a healthy diet (one that encompasses a diversity of foods with said trace minerals and vitamins). Vitamin A According to Smil, ~250m people do not have enough vitamin A. Vitamin ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 W24/2025: Monday 09 June - Sunday 15 June 2025 Caption: Reading boy Tech Added a web scrobbler (downloaded .crx file, added to Ungoogled Chromium and Vivaldi). Need to add command-line (CLI, TUI) scrobbling. Maybe this set of tools that include SomaFM and YouTube/Invidious, and scrobbling? Tech Tasks Upgraded the SDCard in my phone ... Read more