Malcolm's Geek Blog

Category: Geek-as-a-Trade

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Memory Management

    Memory Management

    I don’t mean this to be metaphorical, but maybe 10 or 20 years from now it will be. Computers and computing require memory. The reason is they need to keep quick calculations and values close at hand, because of communication speeds, because we need them to be quick and responsive, particularly for video displays and…

  • Getting better at customizing WordPress

    Getting better at customizing WordPress

    Since last year, I’ve been volunteering on a Taproot Foundation Website grant, and we’ve been setting up WordPress for a nonprofit that got awarded the grant for them to use as a replacement website for their content and publications. I’ve been working as the “lead developer” and my various hard and soft skills (including mentoring…

  • Still seeking a good CrashPlan Home Unlimited Family replacement

    Still seeking a good CrashPlan Home Unlimited Family replacement

    As you may or may not know, CrashPlan, in April 2017, announced intent to mothball the CrashPlan Home service by October 2018, so since then I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement for my family.

  • 2017 Thanks Taking

    2017 Thanks Taking

    Let me start with a statement about “Thanksgiving”. We’re supposed to give thanks for all that we have. That’s great, but it elides the genocides, massacres, and wars that US settlers had with the natives of North America before taking possession. It elides the biological warfare. It elides centuries of neglect, abuse, and outright murder…

  • Time to upgrade Mediawikis again!

    Time to upgrade Mediawikis again!

    I did this last year and took notes and made observations. This time I’m upgrading three mediawiki installations:

  • A modern dev’s Git/GitHub centric process to change a file

    A modern dev’s Git/GitHub centric process to change a file

    Just so you know, and this probably isn’t the most modern/bleeding edge process or platform, but as a modern-ish dev who’s interested in using and leveraging the cloud service equivalent for tracking changes to my self-hosted WordPress files, this is my process.

  • The dreaded rebuild

    The dreaded rebuild

    I don’t know about you, but I am rough on computers. In the course of the weeks and months I spend doing geeky shit, I tend to load and overload and reload and reconfigure and rebuild and reinstall a bunch of different kinds of development tools and platforms and language interpreters for different purposes and…

  • Javascript geeking – p5.js and matter.js

    Javascript geeking – p5.js and matter.js

    I haven’t done HTML/Javascript geeking in a while, but thought while I’m in downtime between courses for my Data Science studies, I’d noodle around. I’ve been idly watching instructional videos by The Coding Train (Dan Shiffman) on YouTube for a while, but I was intrigued by both p5.js and matter.js (as an aside, there are other…

  • Making a Home WiFi Network faster

    Making a Home WiFi Network faster

    My friend Deb came by yesterday and after some fiddling we got her computer on my wired Ethernet network, which is pretty fast (150 Mbps to the Internet), and 15 times faster than her computer’s usual 10 Mbps WiFi connection. Anyway, she asked how to improve her home WiFi, and by the end of the…

  • Tools

    Tools

    Just a note: I’d like to thank the freeware program, Lyx, for helping create LaTeX markup for various mathy-sciency things I post about. Very helpful. You have to know what to include/not for Jetpack’s LaTeX interpreter, Beautiful Math (most especially the preamble that makes a Lyx document a document, and various carriage returns that tend…

  • MacBook Pro slow shutdown (macOS Sierra)

    Just a quick tech note. If you have macOS Sierra and you’re a coding/geeky/programming type and your OS is taking a huge amount of time to shut down, update your MySQL to 5.7 (I had to reinstall Homebrew to do that). If you’re not, maybe tweak your ExitTimeOuts (or get your pet geek to do…

  • Upgrading MediaWiki

    Just a note about a day in the life of a geek. This all starts with the fact that I maintain two MediaWiki servers on my hosting plan. One is for my food-related experiments, recipes, and other household cooking and food info. The other is for game-playing. For a look at the cooking and food…

  • Reporting Issues – Geek-as-a-Trade series

    Reporting Issues – Geek-as-a-Trade series

    One of the geeky intersections I have in personal and professional geekery is that of reporting issues. Sometimes this is with an online shop or app or web service. Sometimes it’s with a network provider, or a cell phone service provider. Sometimes I have to report to a professional IT Networking team. Other times I’m…

  • Philosophy and Introduction – Geek-as-a-Trade series

    I’ve been a geek all my life. My work, my play, my housekeeping all involve geeking at some level. While plenty of geeks involve geekery in all parts of life, here is how I think I differ from most geeks especially at work and what’s important and valuable about that difference: I write stuff down and…