Category: Uncategorized

I have something to say about inflated college costs, student loans, and state taxes and you’re gonna hear about it. I have an English degree from the University of Alabama, Class of ’99.

cPanel has a mechanism to completely suspend outgoing email for an account, which is useful when there’s a bunch of spamming going on. Particularly contact form spam when the admin of a site can’t or won’t disable or secure the form. — root@host [~]# whmapi1 suspend_outgoing_email user=spamalot metadata: command: suspend_outgoing_email reason: OK result: 1 version:… Read more Block outgoing email for a Direct Admin user

Since I’ve been working from home, I’ve been using mpsyt as a command line player for music from YouTube. Revived a 2008 HP Mini netbook with Lubuntu as an auxiliary machine and needed something really light as far as resource usage. You can configure mpsyt for audio only and it’s vastly lighter than playing videos… Read more Automatically share mps-youtube activity to a website

I don’t know if I could call myself a climate change refugee, but a big part of why I quit my job in Dallas to move back to Birmingham was the intolerably hot summers. I know Birmingham is the Deep South and it’s relatively hot in the summers here. July is typically the hottest month.… Read more July reminds me why I fled Dallas

Of course I’m referring to several libraries.  The paper library in my house and my ebook library on my server.  And the public libraries I’ve always depended on.  When I was a kid, in Sylacauga.  In college, the University of Alabama.  Then Dallas and now here in Birmingham. Before the internet, when I was unsure… Read more What libraries mean to me

Long work weekend, it always is. But I baked cookies in between fixing servers! Relevant XKCD reminded me of a funny I did several years ago. https://xkcd.com/341/ Back around 2007-2010, I did a lot of testing for the XS Schoolserver for the OLPC XOs. I usually didn’t bother with wifi encryption since I was constantly… Read more Reminiscing about pwning

I get so much comment spam on this blog. I was cleaning it out tonight and some phrases struck me as modern poetry. It’s probably a Markov chain generating this, of course. But copy/pasting some phrases look like modern poetry, with some very minor edits. Don’t wear seat belts lest you drown in you own… Read more Comment Spam Poetry

So, I updated to NextCloud 13 and didn’t realize how much I’d miss Keeweb. I use Keepass on my home desktop and sometimes need to access stuff in that database elsewhere. I usually keep the Keepass db updated on my NextCloud installation to back up the file. I was disappointed it didn’t support 13, but… Read more Keeweb on NextCloud 13

The ConfigServer Firewall is one of the better options as far as firewalls.  But accidentally triggering blocks in CSF on your own server is really annoying.

Last Thursday afternoon, I took off work early to meet my brother Mason, who flew in from Austin to wrap up Dad related stuff. And it turned out to be an unexpectedly eventful weekend. My first broken bone!