Note: as of 2022, our household moved from Xiaomi to Samsung phones (similar spying, different government), and ditched the increasingly annoying Mi Box for a Google Chromecast (and Google Nest in a different room). We still love things like wired earbuds and backpacks from Xiaomi, but are suspicious of anything with any greater electronic footprint. ... Read more

This is about linux desktop issues (as opposed to server), and mainly deals with desktop-style configuration. See this post about shell and command-line utilities and environments. See also ChromeOS - Apps, Config, Utilities for the companion article on ChromeOS. Android Apps Android Emulators for Linux This is pretty much unneeded these days. Apps and Utilities ... Read more

Update early 2021 - Apparently ChromeOS outsold OSX in 2020. This makes sense as the strength of the ChromeOS is primarily in the education market, and that market exploded with demand because of Covid-19 school closures and the need for devices for remote schooling. This is an overview of what Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, and Chromebits can ... Read more

First steps after logging into an Amazon Linux box: Set up the Name Services (DNS, Hostname) Properly Note there are several places this needs to be set. nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 Make this look as follows: DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=dhcp ONBOOT=yes TYPE=Ethernet USERCTL=yes PEERDNS=no DNS1=84.200.69.80 DNS2=84.200.70.40 DHCPV6C=yes DHCPV6C_OPTIONS=-nw PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=yes RES_OPTIONS="timeout:2 attempts:5" DHCP_ARP_CHECK=no Note that this fixes the general VPC ... Read more

Tesseract OCR is a library and engine for optical character recognition. Version 4.0 has a greater facility for neural network training. The Tesseract Wiki is a good place to start. The Tesseract V4.0 neural network in particular implements an LSTM engine.

DeepSpeech Speech Recognition Machine Learning These are notes to the project, which seem to me worth pursuing. Having recently seen a number of AWS re:invent videos on Vision and Language Machine Learning tools at Amazon, I have ML-envy. Time to start a project, but while I wait for the Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate to ... Read more

Dropbox is a cloud storage and sync service, with additional editors/apps, such as Paper and Showcase. For various reasons, those additional Dropbox apps are not useful for our use cases. However, storage and sync are excellent in and of themselves, and generally superior to Google Drive which is the only real alternative. What Dropbox gets ... Read more

Dropbox Paper is a product I really want to like. For one thing, the promise of better editor is something long unfulfilled. And taking some design cues (or perhaps merely unrelated similarities), Medium did do something nice for the blogging environment. By extending it as essentially a wysiwyg Markdown+ editor, drag and drop-friendly, with handy ... Read more

We can call this Tsuite, inspired by Toot Sweet (a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang candy invention), and is meant to provide some functionality offered through third party collaborative documents. The main point is to have a self-hosted, free-and-open-source alternative, albeit with more bare bones functionality. Ultimately the goal is to be functional enough to allow ... Read more

AWS DHCP options are set on a per-VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) basis. By default, things like the search scope and DNS servers used by a given AWS Instance are set by DHCP which also provides the private IP address (but not any Elastic IP Addresses). Indeed, the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is a fundamental core ... Read more

The current system of analytics tracking is so very broken, let us count the ways: Most solutions require third party trackers These are easily blocked by third-party ad blockers/privacy tools They are mostly javascript (and javascript can be disabled) They are a privacy nightmare, even when implemented properly They slow a site down by increasing ... Read more

A big part of speed is managing the browser cache. This usually means setting compression (gzip/deflate) and expirations of cached content. Compression takes place at the web server (generally after minification). Minification usually also combines files together, so that that there are fewer requests. Compression provides enormous advantages (much more than minification), however, minification done ... Read more

MySQL is good for large multi-user databases. However, when dealing with few changes to the database, and many reads, it is far from a great solution (in fact, is a terrible solution). SQLite is far superior in that situation, and for serial/sequential edits. MySQL 5.6 vs. 5.7 For those with minimal database needs, 5.7 is ... Read more

Note: This page is a document of the next generation of webdev/devops from what is currently in place (granted, much out-of-date). What follows is a personal technology stack learning task list rather than a comment on the state of web development. Updated - June 2019 2019-2020 Priorities Focus on maintaining technologies that work good enough ... Read more

Two words time-based automation: cron and crontabs (and other apps such as anacron) are needed for so many things on a server. Here is how to use cron and crontabs on Amazon Linux AMI. Install crontabs This will in addition install several dependencies, including cron. yum -y install crontabs chkconfig crond on service crond start ... Read more

There are several sites which sell unlimited access to a large number of WooCommerce and other themes and plugins. These sites are taking advantage of the GPL which allows for free distribution, though it is unclear if they are violating use agreements (or trademarks). In any case, each of these sites has a set of ... Read more

This is a collection of stuff that can help out when things go wrong. Extract Fingerprint and Public Key from a Private Key Extract Public Key from Private Key: ssh-keygen -y Generate a Fingerprint of a Private Key to verify in the AWS EC2 Console: openssl pkcs8 -in path_to_private_key -inform PEM -outform DER -topk8 -nocrypt ... Read more

Tokyo still top choice for Asia HQ Datacenter Even with multiple options coming online in Singapore, Tokyo is still the best option for a single, Asia-based datacenter. Even when serving locations such as Thailand and Vietnam, Tokyo is a strong competitor to Singapore. Linode is my unmanaged VPS of choice. They have a great service, ... Read more

This assumes a current configuration of: - Amazon Linux (6.x RHEL series) - Apache 2.4 - PHP 5.6 + Opcache - Oracle MySQL 5.7 Installation up to this point is encompassed by: - OpenVPN on Amazon Linux EC2, basic configuration and securing an EC2 instance - Amazon Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, installing and configuring ... Read more

PATH can be a pain, but there are some basics: Syntax $PATH before or after (before) Is EXPORT needed, or not (not) Where is PATH set All apps+shells /etc/environment All shells ~/.profile or /etc/profile for all users (or a separate file under /etc/profile.d/ if using pacman) Bash shell ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login) Fish shell ... Read more

Note: Amazon Linux AMI is essentially CentOS 6.x. Everything below works on CentOS as well. Preparation for Amazon LAMP The OpenVPN on Amazon Linux AMI is a good place to start in preping the L for the AMP part of the lamp stack. Lots of good stuff there. A followup is WordPress Multisite on Amazon ... Read more

OpenVPN is great, and the OpenVPN command line client and the Viscosity GUI are also nice. However, all configurations need to be checked to ensure there is no information leakage. Secondly, the basic OpenVPN connection needs another layer of encryption and/or obfuscation, in order to interoperate with Internet firewalls and services that use deep packet ... Read more

Amazon Lightsail is a VPS services offered by Amazon that competes with the likes of Rackspace, DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. Note: As of mid 2018 AWS effectively halved its prices on Lightsail. This means there is a $3.50 USD/mo. option and the $40 option listed below (4gb ram/2 cpu/60gb ssd/4tb xfer) is actually only $20 now. ... Read more

I've gotten fed up with the nonsense that is Chromecast (slow, limited), Apple TV (slow, limited), and Fire TV Stick (slow, limited). I ran across the Vero 4K, which was announced in February, 2017. Besides good reviews about good hardware, the responsive and active half-way decent, half-asshat forum (using Discourse), the system uses OSMC (open ... Read more

What I learned in migrating from CentOS on Linode to Amazon AMI Linux on EC2. Note: Amazon Lightsail is probably a better comparison, but it is not available in the region we need it in, so EC2 is required for now. Update: Lightsail is now available in more regions. VPS Hosting and Operating System A ... Read more

See also OpenVPN on ChromeOS and Android OpenVPN on an AWS EC2 T2.Nano Instance The T2.Nano instance is the smallest instance generally available for AWS EC2. As of 17-June-2017, the Nano includes the following resources: 512mb RAM 1 vcpu (30 credits + 3/hr, up to 72 credits) 1gb network out traffic Alternatively, a $5 USD ... Read more

Amazon is different than other companies. From the outside, this difference can appear as anomolies, odd things that stand out. I belive that there is a fundamental way of understanding the current state and dynamo of change within Amazon. Customer Centrism Amazon is meant to be the most customer-centric company on Earth. Likely when we ... Read more

The first trillionaire will not be a human, it will be a bot (though a sophisticated one). Suffice it to say that making money, legally or extralegally, will be something that could be done by a system designed to do so, that could have enough ability to act in a marketplace, and enough insight to ... Read more

This is meant to house information and tasks to install, configure and maintain python, pip, and other utilities. See the Pelican page for Pelican-specific information. What is Python good for Python is a general purpose scripting language and can be useful for: Websites Using Pelican, Django, Flask Applications Using Kivy for native apps in Android, ... Read more

Recent malware and phishing attackes continue to increase in scale and target gmail and other infrastructure. Since many folks keep email mostly in the cloud, and even worse, client synchronization would delete any mail removed from a mailbox, making the client ineffective as offline backup, a system is needed to ensure there is an adequate ... Read more

Below are bulletted list items. Later this will turn into better copy. Summary: Use Texvc when necessary, and KaTeX when possible. Math in Chrome SVG is the preferred method for Math on Chrome, though accessibility is still an issue Basically, for Chrome, the options are: ship small images at a great expense in time (MathJax), ... Read more