Hello again, let’s take a little detour from our regular programming.
Turn back time a decade and a half, or something, and I was spellbound by the game Dark Souls from FromSoftware. Like many others, I eventually stumbled upon the EpicNameBro YouTube channel. ENB was an American living and working in Japan who frequently posted interesting gameplay videos from the Japanese edition of Dark Souls.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days. It’s even sucking the last drops of blod out of the wasteland that is this blog. How arrogant of me to believe I was writing content for humans, when in fact, a battalion of AI bots are my only constant readers.
I’m already coming up on my sixth anniversary with Hugo. Wow, time really does fly. I feel like sharing some of my experiences with Hugo and how it compares to my previous long run with WordPress.
At the end of last year, I decided to move my email server to Contabo. This came to be after being enticed by the “too good to be true” prices and specifications of its VPS offerings. I have great faith in German businesses, but in retrospect, I should have done a bit more research before hitting the deploy button.
When I deployed my email server with DigitalOcean five years back, it delivered at a competitive price and performance. A few years later, the same server has gotten a price hike but no upgrades or resource increases. Even so, hosting your email server is not for the faint of heart, and IP reputation is a big part of the game. Therefore, I stayed with DigitalOcean until the depletion of resources finally forced my hand.
A couple of years ago Disney released a new series based on the classic Willow movie. The show had everything you’d come to expect from Disney: Strong independent women kicking ass. A beautiful young prince in distress. And a band of silly bickering men for comic relief.
It continued none of the magic from the movie, except from Warwick Davis himself. Regardless, I was planning on finishing the show, one day, eventually.
StackSocial, an online marketplace owned by StackCommerce is seemingly always running the deal of a lifetime on Windows 11 Pro. StackSocial is offering the software with a retail value of $199 with 89% off. Reputable technology websites like ZDNET, CNET, Android Police, Cult of Mac, and PCMag are running commission-based promotions on Microsoft Software from StackSocial.
After logging into my Hetzner account, I was met with a message informing me that my current cloud server plan was being deprecated. I could either choose to keep my existing server plan or rescale it. In my experience, this approach is usually a disguised upsell attempt, but thankfully not so with Hetzner.
Finding a solid and reliable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that you can trust is not a task to be taken lightly. For iOS, my choice has been the open-source application Raivo OTP. However, after yesterday’s automatic update, I no longer have my OTPs.
This is not another post about the never happening “Year of the Linux desktop”. I’ve been running GNU/Linux on my desktop for more than 20 years without ever believing the grass was greener on the other side. However, three years ago, I reluctantly replaced my Slackware Linux installations with the offerings from Linux Enterprise providers Canonical and Red Hat.
Since the end of last year, most of my backlinks have originated from websites without any relevant connection to my content. However, they’re suspiciously similar, identified by the suffix of the referring URL being -k.html. Another distinct feature of the backlinks is that they’re only targeting (as in hotlinking) images.
The conclusion of last week’s thrilling story about cryptocurrency scammers and service providers. Who did come to the aid of Joe Nobody, and who conveniently turned a blind eye to my abuse reports. Welcome to the good, the bad, and Namecheap.
Annoying e-mail spam lures Joe Nobody out of his slumber to once again try to convince service providers to pull the plug on a scammer. Welcome to another installment of Joe Nobody VS world.
With the unfortunate demise of Bibliogram, I decided to bite the bullet and sign up for an Instagram account. It was not an easy decision to make, but there are a few athletes I need to keep an eye on. I mean, for sports betting purposes.
I find great value in much of Mozilla’s technical documentation and resources. However, the current state of the Mozilla Observatory can hardly be described as anything other than an embarrassment. I believe it’s high time the people behind the project start to eat their own dog food.
A few days ago I discovered several referral spam links to the domain servicematch.cancer.org in my server logs. Spam referrals are usually a part of some blackhat SEO campaign used to generate traffic, and if possible, get the URL listed on a website’s public statistics page.
Content warning: This article contains mildly sexually explicit text and images.
As a longtime believer in a decentralized web, I’m glad to finally have been able to put this blog on the InterPlanetary File System. It’s been a fun little side project, and it allowed me to cut my teeth on IPFS.
For the last few weeks, my feeds and federated timelines have been filled with absolutely brilliant marketing campaigns for Plausible Analytics, the new open-source privacy-focused website analytics tool. Plausible Analytics has enjoyed exponential growth and is frequently recommended by privacy-conscious voices in the FOSS community.
If you’re a geek like me then you probably enjoy spending your time hardening and optimizing your servers to support modern security standards and policies. If so, I’d like to share my favorite online resources and encourage you to take up the challenge of beating paranoidpenguin.net.
The amount of services offering (or even demanding) two-factor authentication (2FA) is ever-increasing. This has encouraged me to find a more resilient strategy for how I store, manage, and backup my secret keys. My old approach relied solely on using time-based one-time password (TOTP) applications capable of exporting and importing 2FA accounts.