Malcolm's Geek Blog

Category: Geek

  • KVM Update

    KVM Update

    For a work project, I have a personal laptop that I use for connecting to my workplace (which may soon be replaced with a work-provided laptop), remotely, and a client’s laptop, that I use for connecting to theirs.

  • The NIH All of Us Research Program

    The NIH All of Us Research Program

    I signed up this week for AllOfUs, which is a (so far) 5 year project headed up by the NIH to try to gather a truly representative research population for the US. For decades, the rest of us have had to put up with the results of medical studies that rely on “normative” study populations…

  • Intersectionality – You’re probably using it wrong

    Intersectionality – You’re probably using it wrong

    I recently asked folks who follow me on Facebook (yes, I’m an old – I know lots of people and participate in lots of social groups that are only on Facebook and yes it’s a problem) and Mastodon what “intersectional” and “intersectionality” mean to them. Of the respondents, most were familiar with only the popular…

  • A stir fry in the life

    A stir fry in the life

    As many of you know, I am Chinese and white. My Dad passed in 2017, but before he did, he taught me a significant portion of his cooking skills (passed down through family) and I am now possessed of a combination of ancestral good sense as well as my own book learning about how to…

  • Visiting Baltimore

    Visiting Baltimore

    This post is through the lens of leaving a relationship that was ending particularly badly in 2012 and only coming back once for a very short visit, a few days, in the intervening time. It’s also for an adventurous foodie friend of mine so there’ll be some content meant loosely for him. But I wanted…

  • Recommendations of Musical Things and Performers from my Youth

    On Saturday during our weekly Cocktail Zoom Hour, I got to talking with Mom about various artists from my youth that I thought she might enjoy or at least find interesting? It was along the frequency of handsome, intelligent singers/artists who had interesting things to say or show that strongly influenced me and that I…

  • Debugging and fixing the conflict I had between Let’s Encrypt certificates and the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress (for joining the Fediverse!)

    Debugging and fixing the conflict I had between Let’s Encrypt certificates and the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress (for joining the Fediverse!)

    I’ve been joining and rejoining bits of my Internet footprint to the Fediverse. I think a couple of years ago I started a mastodon account and dropped off because my corner of it was dead and I didn’t really understand how self-serve it was. More recently, after starting to record myself streaming video games (in…

  • More COVID Resources

    More COVID Resources

    Another in probably a short and nearly finished series of posts wherein I tried to keep up with the flood of COVID info I was encountering on Twitter. I simply don’t have the time to keep up with what’s now a flood of info, given that our great leaders have apparently thrown up their hands…

  • More COVID and Long COVID tweets and links

    More COVID and Long COVID tweets and links

    An update to the last post, I collected a lot of links and tweets, which I’ll attempt to organize here.

  • A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 3 – Drilling into DNS

    A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 3 – Drilling into DNS

    I want to look into how we do DNS these days. There are a couple of choices – one of the reasons there are choices is that DNS kind of sucks. But it also drives the Internet. I am old enough that I remember, having just missed the era of programming mainframes with punch cards,…

  • A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 2 – Design, Planning, and Notes

    A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 2 – Design, Planning, and Notes

    Having decided on a goal, it’s now time to rough out the approach. Basically, what do I need to do to make this happen? Decide on regular DNS or Dynamic DNS to provide an external DNS hostname so other peers can find my instance. regular DNS Domain: perivid.xyz Registered, registrar chosen, domain chosen. DNS A…

  • A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 1

    A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 1

    Sort of growing out of my impulse to record leukemia patient knowledge for posterity, I started playing PC games and streaming them. My original goal there was just to get used to recording my own video, used to hearing and listening critically to my own voice, figuring out what to talk about when playing games…

  • An attempted compendium or at least a start of a resource guide on Long COVID

    An attempted compendium or at least a start of a resource guide on Long COVID

    One of my extended adult chosen family has contracted COVID. He’s fit, healthy, but a Gen X old (approximately) like the rest of us. Perhaps too fit, because he hates hearing that as far as we know, Some of the best ways to avoid Long COVID are to take a 6 week break from any…

  • More on that custom widget – more about data analytics and researching stuff

    More on that custom widget – more about data analytics and researching stuff

    Let’s talk about lay research, one of the cornerstones of science, and reproducibility, another, and   doing one’s research and homework before putting something out in the world when developing even trivial things like iOS Shortcuts-driven Widgets.

  • Writing/Customizing/Automating a Custom Widget in Apple’s iOS 14

    Writing/Customizing/Automating a Custom Widget in Apple’s iOS 14

    (NOTE: These are the life and times of a geek – we do this kind of thing for ourselves or our loved ones. It’s part of what I do to make a living, sometimes. Or just to impress neighbors or even help them sometimes. But that’s why this is in the Geek-as-a-Trade series.) So I…

  • “Advanced” Home Automations with HomeKit, Eve’s HomeKit app, and Homebridge

    “Advanced” Home Automations with HomeKit, Eve’s HomeKit app, and Homebridge

    From time to time as I’m writing something for another use (I spend an inordinate amount of time updating house planning and house maintenance documents, moreso now that I’ve got a significant investment in “smart” home technologies in the house), I figure “Hey, maybe this’ll be useful for someone else to see!”, so I copy/paste…

  • RPE System for Fitness

    RPE System for Fitness

    IMPORTANT NOTE: Though I am talking about fitness, and my goal is to be more fit, stronger, more flexible, and better conditioned, and more capable, I remain fat, and I am likely to continue to be fat. Not only that but I’m a fat acceptance activist. So don’t be using this blog post to shame…

  • Unit Tests and Test Driven Development (TDD)

    Unit Tests and Test Driven Development (TDD)

    I am working on a project, both to develop a little widget – a calculator to support my weightlifting exercise – and to do it and document it a RIGHT WAY, so that I might later turn that work into a book or a vlog series or whatever. Anyhow, while documenting the setup (in my…

  • The KLF

    The KLF

    While I was growing up, I only really had access to radio and to my parents’ LP collection (yeah, I know, old). So my primary go-tos were, embarrassingly (or, SUPER COOL! depending on who I’m talking to): Robert Preston’s Chicken Fat Youth Fitness workout song The Story of Star Wars Album Kate Bush’s The Kick…

  • Notes and remarks on my Wok Hei Lettuce with Chopped Salted Chiles

    Notes and remarks on my Wok Hei Lettuce with Chopped Salted Chiles

    This is another promotional post about the anthology about recipes and cooking called Feeding the Muse, edited by Leona Wisoker. I’ll get the promotional stuff out of the way under the fold (the 2nd chapter), then go on to the writing about this section of my chapter.

  • Short reccs for Asian restaurants in the East Bay

    Short reccs for Asian restaurants in the East Bay

    An old colleague just contacted me today about recommendations for Asian restaurants in the SF East Bay. I figured some of you might be interested in my response.

  • On contributing to an anthology about cooking

    On contributing to an anthology about cooking

    This post is both promotional and musing, so to get the promotional stuff out of the way, read more, and I’ll try to stuff it all into the first paragraph.

  • 2018 SGV Trip, Day 4 (Monday)

    2018 SGV Trip, Day 4 (Monday)

    Good morning! This is the (delayed) fourth diary entry for a trip we just finished taking through the San Gabriel Valley with some friends. You can find the map here, which has some photos and may also have comments as the trip goes on, tied to each location we visit, and organized according to date.…

  • 2018 SGV Trip, Day 3 (Sunday)

    2018 SGV Trip, Day 3 (Sunday)

    Good afternoon! This is the (delayed) third diary entry for a trip we just finished taking through the San Gabriel Valley with some friends. You can find the map here, which has some photos and may also have comments as the trip goes on, tied to each location we visit, and organized according to date.…

  • 2018 SGV Trip, Day 2 (Saturday)

    2018 SGV Trip, Day 2 (Saturday)

    Good afternoon! This is the (delayed) second diary entry for a trip we just finished taking through the San Gabriel Valley with some friends. You can find the map here, which has some photos and may also have comments as the trip goes on, tied to each location we visit, and organized according to date.…

  • 2018 SGV Trip, Day 1 (Friday)

    2018 SGV Trip, Day 1 (Friday)

    Also get some dumplings. seriously. What are you? An Animal?

  • Migrating WordPress from one URL to another (with Dreamhost)

    Migrating WordPress from one URL to another (with Dreamhost)

    I haven’t seen a comprehensive guide for this so I figured I should probably write it up. A site on my Dreamhost Shared Hosting Server was compromised a few days ago, and even though my security is decent, I figured it was time to switch up the configuration for my 4 WordPress blogs. The goal…

  • Blowing my own horn a little – Gitlab repositories and demo sites

    Blowing my own horn a little – Gitlab repositories and demo sites

    Lately while alternating with looking for jobs/work, I’ve been doing programming exercises with The Coding Train, which is a good, approachable YouTube-based general tutorial/set of programming prompts, discussion, demo, and training. It’s a continuation of work I’ve been doing since late 2017.

  • On keeping passwords and accounts

    On keeping passwords and accounts

    Lately there have been some high profile password issues. Twitter discovered a log that was logging passwords in cleartext (this is eminently avoidable if you have an internal security team that’s properly empowered to train developers not to do this sort of thing). GitHub too.

  • Administrative Note (3/2018)

    Administrative Note (3/2018)

    Just a note. Today I upgraded the PHP framework for my WordPress blogs to version 7.2, which is good in the sense that an upgraded infrastructure is good for overall security in any service or application, but it seems to be generating a warning in the header of pages on the site. Hopefully Automattic, the…