Tralfaz

Category: Uncategorized

  • Fun and games – Cloudflare and SSH

    Fun and games – Cloudflare and SSH

    As I mentioned in a recent post, one of my sites, a WordPress site to help a friend sell their house, got hammered with xml-rpc requests. It didn’t get hacked, but it did bring apache to a painful halt, and filled the memory.

    To prevent that, I setup Cloudflare in front of it, to act as a CDN and a way to prevent it from being attacked. Thus, in the future, I should be able to regain control without too much pain and suffering.

    However, I discovered one minor issue. Since I pretty much use ssh to login to the droplet almost daily, I quickly discovered that just didn’t work.

    At first, I was scratching my head, thinking that I messed something up majorly. Then I recalled that I had switched to Cloudflare for my DNS and CDN, and it clicked. Alas, how they work is they hide your IP address, and then use the magic of their service to serve up your cracking good jams.

    Unfortunately, the ssh request gets routed to the wrong ip address, and naturally, no response.

    Not being able to ssh into my server is a really bad thing. But how to work around it?

    First I tried to set a local hosts file to override the DNS, but that didn’t work. Bummer.

    Second, I can ssh if I use the dotted quad IP address. It works, but, I am too old to remember that many dotted quads.

    Third, and the one that I am using is to create a cname that points a prefix to the original address (in this case, I am using ssh so ssh.tralfaz.org will point to the TLD, and then I turn off the cloudflare redirect. Not optimal, but it works. It does leave me somewhat vulnerable, but alas, not many attack vectors happen to the subdomains.

  • Photography

    About a month ago, I posted about how I was finally cutting the cord, and moving all my serious pictures out of the Apple Photos application. It was just too constricting, and while their “Pro” app for photographers, Aperture was great, they have abandoned it.

    I began seriously using Adobe Bridge which was free (as in beer) and worked pretty well as a lightweight photo manager. But it’s major flaw was that the importer really didn’t handle RAW files gracefully (the version I had, CS6, wouldn’t preview the .CR2 files from my camera, so I couldn’t do any pre-sorting. Lame.)

    SO, it is back to Lightroom, a more feature rich Adobe product, that integrates well with Photoshop, and offers many capabilities. A bit overkill for a hobbyist like me, but its importing tool is incredible.

    Now, I am going through my images, re-organizing them, and selectively editing them. If you follow me on Facebook, look at my photo albums for some of the results.

    One thing I was turned on to are a set of filters from Topaz Labs, plugins for Photoshop, that give you some insanely cool effects for your pictures. I have to thank an old friend Inge Fernau, for this addiction. I will write about them in future posts, but to summarize them, they are plugins for photoshop with presets (and other manual controls) that give a huge variety of really incredible effects.

    Here is a gallery of images that I have processed.

  • Some Apple Grumbling

    After yesterday’s post, and one a few weeks back about the aging of my laptop, and how battery life seems to be on the wane, I had a bit of a love-hate thing going with my trusty MacBook Air.

    When I got it, I easily (and I mean really easily) got 12+ hours of normal use on a charge. Often a few days between needing to hook it to the charger.

    But with Yosemite, the full disk encryption seemed to take a toll. Still for the added security, I was satisfied. Then El Capitan came, and battery life turned to absolute shit. 4 hours on a charge, watching the battery percentage drop like a late 1960’s Chrysler Newport wagon’s gas gauge on the freeway was no fun.

    However, from opening the activity monitor, I noticed that there were two services that were sucking YUUUUUGE amounts of CPU cycles and battery.

    Googling them lead me to an odd culprit. If you are syncing your contacts with Google Apps accounts (and I was), that often these two services would run rampant, and soak your battery. Disabling the sync from Google Apps, and boom, I am back to a reasonable run rate.

    2 hours of use, writing blogs, and the like, and I am still at 93%. Not bad for a laptop nearing 3 years old.

    Not sure if this is an apple problem, or a google problem, but at least I got my battery life back.

  • Sad Days

    As anyone who knows me in real life knows, I have rescued Greyhounds. I have donated a lot of time and money to the southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption org, and ran their website for a few years.

    Last Tuesday, we had to put one of our greys to sleep. He had long suffered from seizures, big, scary grand-mal epileptic seizures that had been increasing in both frequency, and in numbers (clustering).

    While we knew the end would come, and that the decision was inevitable, it still hurts to lose one of your fur kids.

    I am not as sad as when we lost his predecessor, Oliver, whose osteosarcoma was sudden, and aggressive. We have known for a long time that with Tate, our job was to weigh quality of life versus, the horrors of seizures.

    I am using my other blog, Greytbros, to write a series of posts to remember the good times, and the joy that he brought us.

    Having a seizure dog is a difficult course, and we are glad we could make his 5 years with us as enjoyable as possible. In the end, he passed peacefully, and while there is a huge Tate sized hole in my heart, I take comfort in remembering the good times.

  • Medium Format Camera

    I have long been a bit of a photography bug for almost all my life. I started early in High School with a photography class, and have been a bit of a shutterbug since.

    Mostly 35mm film and now digital, I always was envious of the medium format cameras.

    About 10 years ago, when DSLR’s were booming, you could pick up a quality medium format camera for a song on E-Bay. A nice Hasselblad with a solid lens for less than $400. Yeah, that sweet of a deal.

    Then it got stupid, with them running for nearly the same as when they were new. So I dropped the idea.

    Recently though, the bug has bitten. Fortunately the renaissance of the prices has ebbed, and you can once again get a good solid camera for $400.

    You can get a variety of film in 120 format, from good B&W to color and slide film, so that wouldn’t be an issue, and processing is still widely available from specialty shops.

    Will I? I don’t know. But it is tempting. What I can be certain of is that I will not be buying a digital back. They seem to start at about $27K.

    (My preference would be a Mamiya 645 with a waist lever viewfinder)

  • To the asshole who was exit lane surfing

    To the asshole who was exit lane surfing

    Yes you, the black BMW who dove in behind me on the exit lane for Lawrence expressway from 280N this morning. Traffic was already moving briskly, 55mph or better, but you had to get a few car lengths further up

    After you honked at me in my wife’s Rav4, I made sure I kept it a reasonable exit speed. Because often it backs up onto the freeway there, and I have seen some doosey accidents there, I take a little caution.

    So, yeah, fuck you.

  • Why I don’t Watch Sports-ball Games

    Why I don’t Watch Sports-ball Games

    Thursday I got a hankering for some Pizza for lunch, so I hit the local Round Table Pizza and their buffet (yep, I felt like pigging out, so nyah!) Of course, there were TV’s on in the dining area tuned into various games.

    The one that had audio turned up was a Baseball game. Oakland A’s versus Detroit Redwings or something (note: I do know that is a hockey team).

    SportsballI have never really been a big fan of sports on the ‘tube. Yes, I will watch a game once in a while, but I really don’t look forward to the weekends to sit idly watching game after game. I can’t remember the last time I tuned into ESPN (and in fact, if you could drop ESPN, and my wife wouldn’t disown me, I would banish it from my cable lineup).

    Back to the broadcast I was watching. Baseball is a fairly slow paced game. You don’t have rapid fire pitching, so there is plenty of dead air time between the batters and even within an “up”, so the sportscasters feel the need to fill the dead time with inane blathering. They just say the lamest things, sometimes weaving in statistics, or weather, or what some player did 5 decades ago.

    It isn’t just Baseball, watch a telecast of a football team, and you get the same mindless drivel. These sports casters are often retired players, and the banter that they do reminds you that while they may have gone to college, they certainly weren’t scholars. The ‘expert‘ panels at half time in football make me stabby.

    I am sure this will draw some hate.

  • Quick test post

    New verision of WordPress, and the ability to create posts from the WP.com site. Need to test this out.

    Nothing exciting here, so just move along.

  • Suck: Camera edition

    Suck: Camera edition

    We spent a wonderful Thanksgiving visiting my sister and her wife in the mountains. Great food, great company, even our menagerie of hounds behaved well (except for the torn off nail from “zoomies”) I even brought my “big” camera to take “good” pictures. Sigh.

    My main digital SLR is a second hand Canon 5D. Bought from a good friend, who lovingly maintained it, it was in great shape in 2010 when I bought it. I also have a couple of the fabulous Canon L series lenses, so the combination takes great pictures.

    However, since I bought a Canon G12, I haven’t used the 5D as much. This weekend was to be different.

    eos_5dI pulled the 5D out of the bag, put the 24-70 F2.8 zoom on (a MONSTER chunk of glass) and the troubles started instantly. After a couple of frames, the reflex mirror “fell off” the frame. Fuck. Not broken, just flopping around loose.

    Sigh, my father was there, with his canon Rebel Digital SLR, so I figured he could borrow the lens. Quickly he realized that it wasn’t autofocusing. Fuck.

    So, now my best DSLR body, and the best glass I own are both knackered.

    (I still have my older 20D body, so I tested the lens on that, yep, no autofocus).

    Time for the shop. Hope it isn’t too expensive. At least I will get the sensor cleaned really good too.

  • Solve California’s Financial Issues Forever

    Solve California’s Financial Issues Forever

    As with most states, there is always a bit of tightness in the budget. California, although our outlook has improved, still is on the precarious edge. I have the guaranteed solution to those fiscal woes.

    First step, raise the fine for texting while driving. California’s is the lowest in the nation at $20 for a first offense. Make it a nuisance, say $100 or $150.

    Second, have every officer of the law on full alert. They will become virtual ticket writing machines, because I see CONSTANT people texting while driving here in the bay area. Literally I SEE with my own eyes, in my slow slung S2000 no fewer than 50 offenses each direction.

    Third…

    Fourth PROFIT!

    For the record, there are four states that do not ban texting while driving and the maximum first time fine/penalty is Alaska. $10,000 and 1 year in jail if you get caught. Source: MotherJones