The advent of Let’s Encrypt means that there is no real excuse to not have SSL/TLS encryption enabled on your website. Now I do on my Ghost properties As someone who has long run his own websites, first with managed hosting, and now with VPS instantiations, I have wanted to take the SSL/TLS plunge. But, as a hobbyist, the cost to go HTTPS has just been a burden that I couldn’t justify. Sure, I can handle a half dozen VPS’s on Digital Ocean, as the bandwidth is modest, and I have yet to make a big splash (hit wise), it is truly a hobby. Registering a certificate with a top tier authority, for a simple website, was $120+ per year. So I lived with the unencrypted http protocol. (more…)
Category: Technology
For general technology related items
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A first brush with Time Machine
As a long time Apple user, (one could say fanatic) I have just used TimeMachine as a set-it-and-forget-it technology. Buy a big external disk, plug it in, and point TimeMachine at it, and let it do its magic.
Once, I had deleted a file, and I recovered it, pretty painlessly, but apart from that one incident, it has been in the background.
Until recently.
New iMac for Barbara
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Upgrade Shenanigans – 16.04 LTS
For a few months, every time I log into my droplets I get a banner advising me to upgrade to the new ubuntu 16.04LTS. I had hesitated as I worried that there would be repercussions.
My first attempt, on a very simple droplet with an nginx webserver with a simple Ghost blog installed. It was a flipping disaster. nodes.js failed, the install broke the nginx, and after 4 hours of messing with it, I punted and restored the snapshot I took.
Before the second attempt, I created a new droplet and built a fresh Ghost instantiation, and installed it from scratch. This time, I learned the proper install and setup. How to configure nginx properly, how to setup and install the Ghost package, and the big change in linux, the systemd. (more…)
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Tech – Laptops with eSATA ports
A general whine here today, but a while back, probably 2009 or so, the rage was laptops with eSATA ports, for faster external storage. USB3 was a glimmer, and FW800 seemed to be relegated to the Mac world.
My new (at the time) Dell Latitude had this eSATA port, and I was running a lot of VMs on VMWare Workstation, and more bandwidth was desirable.
So I bought a high performance Seagate eSATA external drive (7200 rpm drive in an enclosure), and thought for sure I was golden. (more…)
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Life with a Thinkpad and Win 10
With my new gig, I was issued a sparkly new Lenovo Thinkpad T450 (must have gotten the tail end of the run, as it was revved to T460 shortly after I started) with a reasonable sized SSD, 8G ram, a decent screen, and the expected accouterments.
About the same time, my employer began rolling out Windows 10 on the desktop, so I am part of that world now. Prior to this, I had been using Windows 7 since 2010, and had become comfortable, passing up the whole Win 8 and 8.1 in the interim.
First thoughts were that I hated it. No, it wasn’t forced the “metro” interface that came with the initial launch of Win 8, and which turned off all the enterprise IT people I knew, but it still had some of that flavor that, well sucked. (more…)