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alance

61 karmajoined 14 years ago

Submissions

Replacing Google Analytics with Matomo on a Pi in a Cupboard

alexlance.blog
4 points·by alance·2 months ago·1 comments

Backing up all the little things with a Pi5

alexlance.blog
1 points·by alance·5 months ago·1 comments

Customer growth is slow. Who do I talk to?

1 points·by alance·6 months ago·3 comments

A personal password manager that works over SSH

alexlance.blog
2 points·by alance·6 months ago·1 comments

Replacing my mail server with AWS SES

alexlance.blog
5 points·by alance·6 months ago·2 comments

Using extended attributes to tag files

alexlance.blog
6 points·by alance·7 months ago·5 comments

The dirtiest CRM: a tale of woe for a Slack app that deserved better

dibsonstuff.com
3 points·by alance·10 months ago·4 comments

comments

alance
·4 days ago·discuss
Sounds like you might need to screw your own mounting post in at the 30mm mark.
alance
·2 months ago·discuss
Perhaps they should phase out the encryption on WhatsApp as well?
alance
·3 months ago·discuss
I only found cal.com in the first place because I searched for an open source calendly alternative.
alance
·3 months ago·discuss
Or why not include the source of your claim up front?

From GitHub comments: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10247

Greyson:

> Hi there, sorry, this issue was fixed in 5.17 (which hit 100% production on 7/21)

They had a difficult to reproduce problem reported in late December 2020, and got the fix rolled out seven months later.

Not sure your criticism "absolutely inexcusable slop code" is well considered.
alance
·3 months ago·discuss
Source?
alance
·4 months ago·discuss
Australia as well.
alance
·4 months ago·discuss
There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow.

(the rest of us edit and re-edit)
alance
·5 months ago·discuss
Jotted down my backup process for home. Spoiler: it's a bunch of SSDs sitting on top of a Raspberry Pi. But there's a few fun things in there too: raid, encryption, cron, make, rsync, ssh, Home Assistant and a tiny loaner dog. Enjoy.
alance
·5 months ago·discuss
Just on your first suggestion, this also means that if a person or process can drop a file (unknown to you) into your ~/bin/ then they can wreak havoc. Eg they can override `sudo` to capture your password, or override `rm` to send your files somewhere interesting, and so on.

Btw on the second suggestion, I think there's a command named `command` that can help with that sort of thing, avoids recursive pitfalls.
alance
·5 months ago·discuss
Fwiw termux + rsync for android phone backup (eg rsync /storage/emulated/0/) will grab most things.
alance
·6 months ago·discuss
I used to self-host email, it was mostly all initial setup and then it just worked for years. Eventually I got a bit wary about the security side of an internet-accessible box and decided to move the whole thing over to AWS SES. Wrote it up here:

https://alexlance.blog/email.html
alance
·6 months ago·discuss
Good question. So one change I made last year was to cap the number of queues the free account could utilize. It's sort of hard to know for certain if that was what moved the needle though.

There has been a suggestion that maybe the free plan could just be a time-limited trial instead.

But it feels like there is some risk associated with that - as often a customer will use the free plan for (eg) six months, before hitting the limits and becoming a paid account.
alance
·6 months ago·discuss
A talk about creating from Ethan Hawke called "Give yourself permission to be creative"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9Gek4V5Q

But my takeaway was more like "Give yourself permission to be bad"

Felt good to be reminded that if you want to make interesting things, it's ok to flail around. It'll feel foolish and that's completely ok, perhaps necessary.
alance
·6 months ago·discuss
Might have been this thing:

https://v.redd.it/fpa35i6b97dg1/CMAF_1080.mp4
alance
·6 months ago·discuss
It seems like the choices are:

a) a cloud-based password service (eg 1password) or

b) a local-storage password database (eg pass, KeePassXC)

My preference is not to store personal account details with an internet accessible third-party (but I can see the value in it for an organization).

And with the local solutions, it doesn't really seem pleasant to manage, use, synchronize and backup password databases across multiple machines. Also it seems like you're just one laptop disk dying away from possibly losing credentials.

To be clear I'm not suggesting anybody should use my hacky script - the article is meant to be more like: "well I don't love this, but here's how I do things".

Got another approach?
alance
·6 months ago·discuss
For many years I used an EC2 server for my personal email (running Debian and Postfix) but I recently decided it might be better to have one less internet-facing server to worry about.

This article documents the setup for AWS SES to handle incoming/outgoing mail delivery.
alance
·7 months ago·discuss
Ha, it suddenly sounds like trouble.

Eg: one could piggy-back an entirely new file onto an existing file (it might have to be text encoded?).

It looks like the kernel might impose a limit of 64KiB on a file's metadata, but that's still quite a lot of room for data smuggling...
alance
·7 months ago·discuss
Yes concerning. The possibility of losing them between filesystems is worrying too.

One rule of thumb is `mv` will keep the attributes by default (given similar filesystem) and everything else needs tweaking/extra args. There's a section on it over here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Extended_attributes#Preserv...
alance
·7 months ago·discuss
My recent journey sorting through years of files and categorizing/tagging them with the built-in Extended File Attribute functionality.
alance
·7 months ago·discuss
Uhh? I didn't ask anyone for an explanation.