Posts on Andy's Blog

Using Posteo with a Custom Domain

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published in October, 2017 – over three years later in 2021 I am still happily using Posteo!

I have been taking back control over my data. One of the biggest jumps I made was to ditch Gmail in favor of a privacy-conscious email provider, Posteo. Of all the email providers suggested by PrivacyTools.io, I chose Posteo because of their commitment to sustainability, transparency, and self-sufficiency. They support full encryption of all user data, and yet do so in a way that supports the standard IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV protocols for easy syncing.

Emacs on an iPad

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With my iPad having replaced my MacBook, the last thing I was missing was Emacs, which I not only enjoy hacking on, but is also how update my blog and resume! Let’s just say that it’s an integral tool in my life which I wanted access to, and I managed to make it happen.

Using a Sonos Beam with an LG TV

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The other week our LG webOS TV (only a few years old, model “50LB6500”) stopped playing Netflix titles in its app. The Netflix error just blamed the TV, and the TV had nothing change. Videos would load, start playing, and crash within a few seconds. Updating the app, the TV, and the network settings didn’t fix it. Finally, I tried resetting the TV to its initial settings, and after getting everything annoying setup again, it worked!

Filtering Spam with Mailroute

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After months of using MX Guarddog to filter spam coming to my public email (as detailed in my prior post Using Posteo with a Custom Domain), I had to find another service. While MX Guarddog was essentially free, it was ineffective. I was still receiving (and reporting) multiple spam emails in my inbox (curiously they mostly came on Monday mornings, I guess spammers have schedules too). I tried to work with support, but even after “adjusting” my filters, there was just too much spam.

Connecting to Mullvad with WireGuard on Android

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Probably the best VPN out there is Mullvad. It is incredibly fast, reasonably priced, completely private, and supports the new WireGuard VPN protocol.

Update

A lot has changed since this post was originally written, and for the better. For one, the WireGuard Android App now supports user mode, and WireGuard has similar support for macOS, OpenWRT/EdgeOS, OpenBSD/FreeBSD, and of course all the Linuxes. What this means is you can use the app on Android without root and without a custom kernel.

How privacy-friendly is your site?

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So /r/privacy pointed me to an awesome tool that taught me about fancy new privacy (and security) headers! I actually scored quite well when I first ran the analysis (0 cookies, 0 third-party requests, and 0 third-parties contacted), but improved my results by adding this to my Nginx configuration:

Reflections|Projections

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I attended the conference Reflections|Projections at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It’s a student-run conference that’s been a regular occurrence for around twenty years, which is especially impressive considering that students are constantly graduating!

Paradox of Tolerance

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On the Paradox of Tolerance, from The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.…We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law. And we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

EvolvedTD: Evolutionary Tower Defense

Sat, 29 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is an ancient post that I started in 2015. The actual content is in this Sway presentation, but at this point, you need some context.

During my senior year of college I participated in an experimental (and amazing) class, Evolving Games: CS 404 / Biol 404 by Dr. Terry Soule and Dr. Barrie Robison. Ten computer science students partnered with ten biology students, and we wrote an evolutionary tower defense game, EvolvedTD, where the creeps evolve in response to the player’s tactics.

Tracking Mailgun Events

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Update

I no longer use nor recommend this setup, see my new setup.

Introduction

I previously hosted my own email server, but found that I don’t particularly like administering one. But I still use my public fronting email to send and receive email, as a custom domain for Gmail. My solution to this utilizes MailGun’s free tier. I won’t cover how I setup the forwarding, as there are many guides. This solution works quite well, except when an email you sent (or was sent to you) fails to be delivered. While MailGun logs the failure, it does not notify you.

PowerShell on GitHub

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I have been pretty busy over the past year. After starting work as a software engineer with the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center June 1, 2016, my life has been a non-stop drive to put a cross-platform port of PowerShell on GitHub.

Emergency Git

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Suppose you just goofed and think you lost some changes. Here’s a step-by-step guide in order to maximize their chance of being recovered. If you’re not already there, go to your Git repository’s directory in your favorite shell, and we’ll commence:

Skip Reset Password for OS X

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

OS X Yosemite has a ~~nifty~~ troublesome password reset screen you can access by turning your computer off and back on from the login screen. However, once you do this, there is no way out. The “Reset Password” boot wizard offers no exit without reseting your password. If you restart your Mac, you will end up right back in the wizard.

Ghost 0.5

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today a fantastic update to Ghost (including multi-user support) was released in the form of Ghost 0.5 - MSR1. I highly recommend reading about all the new features. With this release comes a much needed incremental update to my Puppet module for Ghost, that fixes dependency specification issues (my bad) and removes the attemped socket permission fix. I still have some more issues to work through, and any help would be appreciated.

Efficient Chunked File Reading in C++

Sun, 20 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Often times I find myself needing to read a file in constant memory rather than all at once. Perhaps I need an implementation to scale to arbitrarily large files, or my consumer is already sending in discrete chunks. Either way, I could not find a good public algorithm to do this, and although it is relatively simple, I figured I would share mine. It is internally documented, but feel free to comment with questions (and especially point out any mistakes you find or improvements you can suggest).

Coffee Roasting

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I actually tried to run a coffee roasting business, the Moscow Bean Company, which ultimately failed for a few reasons (got busy with school, was not profitable, and the roaster died). But I very quickly developed quite a love for roasting my own coffee.

Net Neutrality

Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

If you use the Internet, you probably have heard about Net Neutrality. Essentially, the big telecommunication corporations are in cohoots with the FCC, specifically the current chairman, Tom Wheeler a prior telecom CEO, to allow ISPs to extort websites for full access to their visitors’ bandwidth. This is the letter I sent via Dear FCC. I urge you to be as loud as possible about our fight.

IFTTT: programming for the Internet

Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So here is a cool tool that I have used for quite a while: If This, Then That. It provides an almost meta-programming ability for the Internet. You setup an IFTTT recipe by connecting various channels (e.g. feeds, Twitter, email, Android phones) to each other via triggers (if this) and actions (then that).

Configuring SSHGuard on Ubuntu Server

Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

SSHGuard is a fantastic alternative to DenyHosts. From the site:

SSHGuard monitors servers from their logging activity. When logs convey that someone is doing a Bad Thing, sshguard reacts by blocking he/she/it for a bit. Sshguard has a touchy personality: when a naughty tyke insists disturbing your host, it reacts firmer and firmer.

Building Ruby 2.0.0 and 2.1.1 on OS X

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For some reason today I needed to install both Ruby 2.0.0-p451 and 2.1.1 on OS X Mavericks, using rbenv. Unfortunately, if you have Homebrew’s readline package installed (which if you are like me, you probably do, as quite a few other packages depend on it), then there is a conflict that causes a build failure.

Updates to my Ghost blog Puppet module

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I pushed out a new release of my Ghost blog Puppet module. This release closes issue #2, where the blog’s service was restarted on every provision, not just on updates to its configuration. The module can finally setup the mail settings for Ghost, so that the annoying message that comes with the default setup goes away. The module also now validates all the parameters sent to the class and to the blog resource using functions provided by Puppet Labs’ stdlib module (which was already a dependency).

OSError with duply on OS X

Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Once in a while when running a duplicity backup via the duply profile manager, I would get an error like this:

--- Start running command BKP at 12:40:44.000 ---
Reading globbing filelist /Users/andrew/.duply/marvin-cloudfiles/exclude
Synchronizing remote metadata to local cache...
Copying duplicity-full-signatures.20140217T200006Z.sigtar.gpg to local cache.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/duplicity/0.6.23/libexec/bin/duplicity", line 1489, in <module>
    with_tempdir(main)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/duplicity/0.6.23/libexec/bin/duplicity", line 1483, in with_tempdir
    fn()
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/duplicity/0.6.23/libexec/bin/duplicity", line 1332, in main
    do_backup(action)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/duplicity/0.6.23/libexec/bin/duplicity", line 1361, in do_backup
    sync_archive(decrypt)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/duplicity/0.6.23/libexec/bin/duplicity", line 1142, in sync_archive
    copy_to_local(fn)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/duplicity/0.6.23/libexec/bin/duplicity", line 1091, in copy_to_local
    tdp.move(globals.archive_dir.append(loc_name))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/duplicity/path.py", line 618, in move
    self.copy(new_path)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/duplicity/path.py", line 444, in copy
    self.copy_attribs(other)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/duplicity/path.py", line 449, in copy_attribs
    util.maybe_ignore_errors(lambda: os.chown(other.name, self.stat.st_uid, self.stat.st_gid))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/duplicity/util.py", line 82, in maybe_ignore_errors
    return fn()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/duplicity/path.py", line 449, in <lambda>
    util.maybe_ignore_errors(lambda: os.chown(other.name, self.stat.st_uid, self.stat.st_gid))
OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: '/Users/andrew/.cache/duplicity/duply_marvin-cloudfiles/duplicity-full-signatures.20140217T200006Z.sigtar.gz'

12:41:31.000 Task 'BKP' failed with exit code '30'.
--- Finished state FAILED 'code 30' at 12:41:31.000 - Runtime 00:00:47.000 ---

Clearly it is an issue with duplicity failing to perform a chown, and thus bailing out. Fortunately, Lee Verberne’s post enlightened me to what was happening: duplicity was copying from the temp directory (owned by root) to a user cache directory, and of course, as a user program, failed to chown from root to user.

Boost with GCC on OS X

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am writing this post in case anybody else wants to build the Boost libraries using the Homebrew version of g++-4.8 on OS X (not Apple’s clang++ masquerading as g++). This is useful if you happen to build cross-platform projects, prefer GCC (Clang is great, really it is, but I don’t use it on Linux), and do not want to build and link specifically for OS X.

Emacs Crash Course

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very quick introduction to Emacs.

Once Emacs is open, Emacs commands are prefixed with Ctrl-x (usually written C-x), which means to hold control and press ‘x’. This combination is a ‘keymap binding’, that is, there is a table of commands that follow C-x, which allows different tables to be made for other prefixes (for instanceC-c, C-u, and C-h). The first three commands you should know are: