Devops

Note: as of mid 2023, this still generally holds. The A23 dispensed with Super AMOLED, so that is a non-starter. The A24 does have that, though it seems that a 4gb/128gb is a standard low-end configuration (again, a non-starter). It seems that an A23 and the year earlier A52 are the same price, but with ... Read more

Audio can be a pain on Linux. One thing is the rather low quality of PulseAudio, which is common. The next is the layered configuration of ALSA as a driver and JACK as a connector. However, JACK can override PAVU, so things don't stay in their neat little boxes. That said, I've come to some ... Read more

To format a USB drive from the Linux command line, we use the following commands: df - disk free umount - unmount filesystems, see also the mount command mkfs - make filesystem lsblk - list block devices df command to display drives df -h Identify the USB drive to format umount command to unmount the ... Read more

DRAFT For Debian LXDE there are a few places to configure the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts. LXPanel Enable the Keyboard Layout Handler in Panel Preferences > Panel Applets Once enabled, right-click on the Keyboard Layout Handler and select "Keyboard Layout Handler" Settings Change Layout Option set to grp:lwin_toggle which sets the left windows key to ... Read more

Linode Longview is a nice web GUI to see instance resource utilization for the last 12 hours (or more if paid). Unfortunately it is easy to get an error installing Linode Longview with their script. Below is how to perform a manual installation. For troubleshooting once it is up and running, see this guide Linode ... Read more

Pelican is a python-powered static site generator that is likely the most popular and mature of its kind. It has extensive documentation. Pelican quickstart (docs) Pelican features Articles (e.g., blog posts) and pages (e.g., “About”, “Projects”, “Contact”) Integration with external services Site themes (created using Jinja2 templates) Publication of articles in multiple languages Generation of ... Read more

One of the easiest and most straightforward ways of installing Debian linux is by a USB drive that has a bootable ISO installed on it. To prepare this, one needs three things and four steps: USB drive Any USB drive over a certain size should work. The current Bullseye Alpha 3 is 3.7gb so a ... Read more

The Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) is a 4" x 4" board (4.5" x 4.5" x 2.0" case) integrated computer. It comes in kit (without ram or storage) or as assembled computers. With the ATX form factor going away, the NUC form factor is increasingly viable as a general purpose replacement. There are even ... Read more

The LMDE3 installation I had done 18 months ago was in need of a refresh. This was based on Debian 9, so I thought Debian 10 would be a good place to start. Unfortunately, the newest release breaks my laser printer, so I've looked at continuing with Debian 9 (aka oldstable) for the forseeable. In ... Read more

Simplicity is a wonderful thing. For the domain name game and hosting services, there are two kinds of simplicity: A single, monolithic simplicity - aka all-in-one A set of modular simplicities - aka best-of-breed At this stage in web hosting, domain name registration, and DNS service offerings, the second form of simplicity is the preferred ... Read more

Microsoft has gone through a lot, and I've been with them for quite a long time, on and off. I became a MCSE in 1998, with a focus on Web, SQL and Exchange server. At the time we were in the battle for the backoffice, which was vs. Novell and Oracle, mainly, but also Linux ... Read more

First, there are two kinds of DNS records: those for client look, and those for a server. Client Lookup - DNS Resolvers I don't trust Google DNS, though for a while it was the go to DNS, and easy to remember at 4.4.8.8 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. For privacy, for me, there are two options, with ... Read more

The day has come when I have confidence it is possible to move off of all third party clouds, with the only exception being social media and social network sites. That is, the wonderful world of email, file sharing and synchronization, and even online document collaboration, can all be supported independent of third party services. ... Read more

This is really about how to get off of Gmail/Google Email for Domains/Gsuite. It is not difficult to get off of Google Drive, and Google Photos, as well as Google Docs and Google Sheets, and the like. But there are certain advatages of Gmail/Google Mail, and the free version of GSuite, which I've been using ... Read more

Paypal Sucks Paypal sucks, as everyone knows. It has one benefit for the consumer (those buying with paypal) and that is their dispute resolution, which I've used perhaps ten times and have never lost. Dispute resolution with credit cards and banks is much, much more difficult and harder to win. For the seller, however, Paypal ... Read more

> Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of the international ... Read more

Chrome, why are you such crap at simple things? I need to delete the cache/cookies from a single website. It appears impossible these days. There is an odd work around, as follows: > Three Dots > Advanced > Content Settings > Cookies > See All Cookie and Site Data > {Search for site} > Remove ... Read more

I've written about WordPress at various points. I've been using this cms for 13-14 years, and for me it is well-known, though a bit worn out. The breakage it has has not improved much, and the resources needed are not up to the modern task. Essentially most performance gains are made through improvements in Nginx, ... Read more

Automattic is the organization behind WordPress the content management system, wordpress.com, and a number of smaller entities. With some estimates, WordPress has ~30% market share of the web. It has taken on in excess of []$300m in funding](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic) over the years. After 2–3 years of development of WordPress, Automattic was founded in 2005 to receive ... Read more

Content Management Systems come in all shapes and sizes, and it is unfair to evaluate their maturity based on their functionality. However, to some degree this is still a useful metric, depending on the fucntionality. Below are hallmarks of functional maturity. Again, certain CMS's will not receive an accurate score based on specific niche uses ... Read more

Note: instructions for installing and configuring phpMyAdmin also included below. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications - Debian on AWS Lightsail - OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall - Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian - PHP & MariaDB on Debian - Grav CMS on Debian As of December, 2018 there are decent performance gains ... Read more

It is a good idea to get PHP and MariaDB on Debian set up before Nginx (except the PhpMyAdmin which can come after). Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications - Debian on AWS Lightsail - OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall - Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian - PHP & MariaDB on Debian - ... Read more

Google likes to remove functionality on free products to induce upselling. This is a common tactic in many software/SAS models. However, the cost of adopting Gsuite is very high, relative to free. Essentially a 5-10 pack of mailboxes with $5/month for the least expensive Gsuite paid option. That's $300-$600/year. What is sadly missing is a ... Read more

A sampling of Debian + Cinnamon keyboard shortcuts (incomplete) Function LMDE3 ChromeOS Refresh Ctrl+R Task List Partial Screenshot Debian Terminal Under Edit > Preferences > Shortcuts set the Edit > Copy, Edit > Paste, and Edit > Select All accelerator keys to Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+A respectively. Screenshots Under Keyboard > Shortcuts > System > ... Read more

Note: I've replaced Fish Shell with Bash in my personal technology stack, as of March 2018. Ha ha, back on Fish Shell. Fish Shell is a very useful shell. I use it on OSX and Linux. Provides for some sanity at the command line. For an editor I use Nano. Note that there are some ... Read more

Bash being the most common shell, it makes sense to learn bash shell scripting. I didn't think this at first and later came to the conclusion, having spent time with Fish Shell. However, Bash is definitely old and creaky with some frankly ridiculous implementation details. Fish can be installed most everywhere, and is generally superior ... Read more

Here are some ways of getting things tweaked. Your mileage may vary. Mint-Y-Dark This theme has some hardcoded colors in PNG files. Grayscale them with ImageMagick, as follows: for file in /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark/gtk-2.0/assets/*.png; do convert "$file" -colorspace Gray "$file"; done for file in /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark/gtk-3.0/assets/*.png; do convert "$file" -colorspace Gray "$file"; done Edit the /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file for ... Read more

Scrollbar usability is shoddy and slipping across wide swaths of the web and software in general. Of course I am getting older, which means this is more and more of an annoyance. We know already, and for some time, how to do scrollbar usability and accessibility. Putting aside voice commands, just the bare minimum of ... Read more

OpenVPN on Debian is the second step in securing an operating system. Below we include ufw firewall installation and configuration as well. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications Debian on AWS Lightsail OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian PHP & MariaDB on Debian Grav CMS on Debian Note: install ... Read more

This is a setup of several items, starting with Debian 9 on Amazon AWS Lightsail. This has server basics and apt, and then follows with links to additional articles. In general, after several years of running CentOS on Linode, and then Amazon Linux AMI on EC2 and Lightsail, I find that Debian 9 is simply ... Read more

Well, it turns out, there is no such thing, per se, as an IPA Keyboard Layout, at least not in the sense that there are keyboard layouts for various languages and layout styles (e.g., English, Dvorak, etc.). This seems to me to be a tremendous oversight, though it obviously came about because someone thought supporting ... Read more

Note: since Debian has Cinnamon built-in as a desktop choice on install, and since the rest of Mint is Ubuntu or Debian (LMDE), it seems a bit nonsensical to go Mint when I can go Debian +Cinnamon. For Cinnamon interface changes, see: LMDE Cinnamon Modifications This document will be somewhat regularly updated with information, and ... Read more

There are several white label options for search and if one considers advertising a viable business model to engage in, then consider Bing or Infospacehttp://www.infospace.com/partners/. Consider the case of Izito and related country code tlds, as well as MonsterSpace, both are pure play partner deals with nothing technical in their own right, with traffic and ... Read more

Dealing with a Kindle (and ebook collection) on ChromeOS requires a different set of tactics than the more straightforeward use of Calibre (unless using it in Crostini is a choice). Functionality Required for Kindle on ChromeOS The basic functionality required includes: Uploading to Kindle device; Downloading from Kindle device; Converting files from epub to mobi ... Read more

This is a brief overview of ChromeOS Keyboard Shortcuts / Keystrokes. Hardware Key Differences No Windows key, no Command key However external keyboards can have these mapped to other keys Capslock Key replaced by Search Key Shft+Search = Capslock Remap Keys > Settings > Device > Keyboard Remap Capslock to Search key on external keyboards ... Read more

Moving from OSX to ChromeOS can be complex because the ChromeOS ecosystem includes Android and Linux applications, though support for those platforms are not fully implemented as of July, 2018. Nevertheless there enough advantages to make a comprehensive attempt at such a migration desirable at this point in time. My personal reasons include an upcoming ... Read more

Blast from the past, this request for smartphone/netbook recommendations comes from May, 2009. Updated below with comments from July, 2018. Note that we've updated the title from Netbooks to Chromebooks. Help! Too Many Choices > Jeff, I am in need of a portable device for accessing email when I'm on the road. Of course it ... Read more