Category Archives: General

To kill or not to kill

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I see it’s over 500 days since I posted anything here.

Ouch!

One of the main reasons I haven’t posted is that software of late has become remarkably stable and I just don’t seem to be coming up against problems these days.

I recently set up Matomo Web Analytics on a server. One of the many reasons I did this was to compare traffic over several sites. I run quite a few sites both for myself and for others and wanted to see if there were any sites that could be culled. To my surprise, this site is still getting visits: nothing hectic but it is still active, and is by no means bottom of the pile.

The majority of visits seem to be concerned about the Iomega iConnect which is a piece of kit which has long vanished off the market. It was always very problematic and my one is now gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. Obviously others are still using it and by the sound of it, still having problems.

The majority of other posts are mainly concerned with issues I had found in previous versions of Linux Mint or WordPress. Over time these issues seem to have been resolved, but presumably people are still running older versions of Mint (or WordPress) and are still coming across those problems.

So the question is whether or not to consign this site to history. I originally set it up as a sort of reference notebook for myself which I could refer to if a problem reoccurred. I haven’t used it for that purpose for a very long time.

Or maybe I’ll start posting again?

On second thoughts, I have enough on my plate.

Installing a free VPN in Linux

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I recently thought I would try installing VPN (Virtual Private Network) on my machine.

This is generally used by people who want to mask their true location as it allocates an IP address in another country.

I had no particular reason apart from the challenge and the curiosity.

Most of the searches gave results on how to connect to premium services and I wasn’t going to pay for something just for an experiment.  Eventually I found a simple solution that uses OpenVPN (a free service).  I’m putting here just for my own future reference because I had a hard job finding it!

sudo apt install golang-go openvpn git
git clone https://github.com/adtac/autovpn
cd autovpn
go build autovpn.go
sudo install autovpn /usr/local/bin/

That should do the job!

To enable VPN open a terminal and launch –

./autovpn/autovpn CA

Note that the CA is a country code (in this case Canada).  You can try other country codes or even leave out that code altogether but I found that CA was the most reliable.

It will prompt for your password and search for a server.  Once it announces “Initialization Sequence Completed” then you are connected.

Not also that the terminal must not be closed during the session.  Just minimise it.

If the connection doesn’t work, go back to the terminal and CTRL+C.  That will offer the choice of stopping the service or trying another server.

Just as a side note, according to whatsmyip.com I’m currently located in Montreal……. 😉

Stylish

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

One of the greatest irritants (for me) on the Internet is the site that somehow thinks it is being trendy when it uses pale text on a white background.

Generally when I come across such a site I get out of it fast unless the information is important in which case I struggle on and curse the designers.

I use ManageWP to manage (!) several web sites.  As this is a tool I use very frequently, the contrast is important, particularly such information as how many sites require updates.  However, they are sadly being ‘trendy’ and feel obliged to display such information in light grey on a white background:

Grey text on white

Now apparently there is little I can do about this short of complaining to the crowd who run the site.

But then there is Stylish.

Basically Stylish allows you to apply CSS styles to any or all of the sites you visit.  Naturally it only applies on my browser so it entirely a personal preference thing.  Unfortunately (for some) it requires a fairly good knowledge of CSS and how to discover which selectors on a web page you want to modify, but there are a load of styles already to download for the most popular sites if you so wish.

I applied the following snippet of code to my ManageWP Stylish:

@namespace url(https://www.w3.org/1111/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("orion.managewp.com") {}
body {
color: black !important;
}
.dashboard {
color: black !important;
}
span.filter-count.badge {
color: black !important;
}
.custom-checkbox {
border: 1px solid #999 !important;
}

This is applied automatically to the web page and this is the result:

Black text on white

There was also a problem with my WordPress editing pages which I have been trying to solve for some time.  It was the same sort of problem – writing or editing text in the Post Editor was difficult as the text appeared grey on a white background.  It took me a long time to realise that it wasn’t the font colour that was the problem but actually the font itself.  Once I had worked that out, I thought about changing the font face on all the sites I edit but that would have been tedious, so I just applied a modification using Stylish.

body#tinymce.wp-editor,
.wp-editor-container textarea.wp-editor-area {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

Now any site that I edit will have a nice clear font.

Text samples

Click to enlarge

It’s a handy little gizmo!

Incidentally, this is not a sponsored post – I just thought it might be of some help….

 

Hidden traffic

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

This site has been somewhat dormant for quite a while?

It's not that I had forgotten it – I have just been busy elsewhere.  Also my Linux has been running very smoothly so I have had no problems to resolve.

The intention of this site was to act as a notebook for myself, to which I could refer if I ran into similar problems again, and in fact I frequently do refer to it.  However, others find my little hints and tricks helpful so at least the site is doing its job properly!

While traffic to here is low but constant, I would consider it a bit of a backwater on the Internet.  So why are hackers so interested in it?  In the last 48 hours, there have been 2,770 attempts to hack the Admin password, and they're still coming.  As each of those 2,770 attempts have instantly been locked out of the site, I shudder to think how many further attempts would have been made if they had been allowed unlimited access to the login page?

It just demonstrates how important security is.  Even a very small site like this is prone to attack, and without security, it could be now hosting a dodgy pharmaceuticals site, dishing out porn or just acting as a slave to attack other sites.

Popularity isn't all it's made out to be!

Why I hate Windows

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

On Friday, I installed a copy of Windows 7 on a new VirtualBox virtual PC.

Yesterday I set about installing software into Windows 7.  In the course of the installation, I noticed that Windows was downloading updates, though for some reason it wouldn’t load the progress screen.

When I finished my installations I checked, and I was informed that all downloads were complete.  I switched off Windows 7.

As expected, The power down produced that familiar screen – to the effect that Windows is installing updates and that I mustn’t power off or interrupt the process.  Apparently there were 150 updates to be applied.  That was at 4pm.

At 11:15pm the process finished and the virtual machine powered off.

Seven and a quarter hours to install software that is already downloaded?  And during this time the machine was useless in that I couldn’t run anything on it or power it down?  That has to be some kind of record?

And on the next power-up it still took a further ten minutes to “update the registry”.

Just in case anyone wonders why I hate Windows and love Linux………..