Posts

Looking back on 100 posts

2023-05-05
16 minutes

This is the 101st post on my website. Humans are fascinated with milestones, especially when they line up with base 10 numerals. As a human myself, I enjoy these milestones, and it's not often I get a chance to do some meta content, so let's give in and see where

Automatic builder discovery with BeautifulSoup

2023-04-14
3 minutes

BeautifulSoup is a very popular HTML parsing library for Python. It's about as popular for HTML parsing as requests is for HTTP requests. BeautifulSoup allows you to provide some HTML markup as a string, and then interrogate and mutate it however you need. Whether to find specific tags, add new

My First CVE

Today is a special day for me, professionally anyway. It's a day I get to tick a fun item off my bucket list, that I didn't think I'd get the chance to. Today, a CVE was released where I am the discoverer: CVE-2023-28837. I have my first CVE!What is a

USB off-site backup

2023-03-31
5 minutes

Today is world backup day, a day to highlight the importance of backups, protecting data, and keeping systems secure (at least that's what Wikipedia says). I'm taking this day as a chance to review my backup strategy, and make sure I'm happy with the coverage I'm getting. I mentioned a

You're doing two-factor authentication wrong

2023-03-10
9 minutes

It was recently announced that Twitter was going to begin hiding two-factor authentication (2FA) behind a paywall, or at least that's what a lot of people saw. In reality, Twitter is only allowing subscribers to their new (ish) "Twitter Blue" subscription tier to use SMS-based 2FA. Everyone else will need

Casting YouTube videos from Linux

2023-02-23
3 minutes

Over the past few months, I've been watching a lot more content on the TV, sat on the sofa, than at my desk like I used to. The bigger screen is much more enjoyable, not to mention it's a different seat to the one I work in 8 hours a

State of the Apps 2023

It's that time of year again, time to steal some of Cortex's search rankings to talk about my own "State of the Apps" - the applications and setups I use to make my life what it is. Since my last post, and in fact in just the last few weeks,

Server Setup 2023

2022-12-31
12 minutes

For a few years now, I've tried as hard as I can to run everything on servers I control, ideally servers I physically control. Partly in an attempt to regain my privacy, party because it's much more fun this way. Over the last year, things have stayed fairly stable hardware-wise

Monitoring Prometheus with Healthchecks

2022-12-15
2 minutes

Prometheus is a crazy powerful metrics and monitoring tool. Prometheus not only lets you scrape and collect metrics from other tools like Traefik and HomeAssistant, but also thanks to Blackbox, monitor the availability of other sites. Prometheus' main loop involves scraping a number of "exporters" over HTTP, looking at the

Server CPU Replacement

2022-11-13
10 minutes

Power bills in the UK are starting to skyrocket, and the costs of self-hosting are going up as a result. The average persons bills are going up pretty fast, and I suspect they don't have a server in their cupboard on 24/7. For a while now, I've wanted to swap

What's this? A new website?

Hello internet, it's been a while. I've been working on something for a while, and today's the day I get to finally release it! Yes, I redid my website - again! But, depending on how often you talk to me, I redid my website finally. This update has been a

Finding RSS feeds

2022-06-26
4 minutes

I love RSS, and I love that it exists. RSS is an open standard for “content syndication”, which basically means you can scrape a list of content from a website and then read it wherever and however you want. Because it’s an open standard, and a fairly simple one at

Power cut precautions

2022-05-19
4 minutes

Last night, the sky was filled with thunderstorms. For a few hours, there was some of the loudest thunder and brightest lightning I’d ever seen. At the time, this was quite interesting, and nicely helped cool down the air too. This morning however, less fun. Shortly after 07:30, my monitoring

How I lost some data

2022-05-10
5 minutes

It’s something no one wants to see: You open up an important file, and are met with very different content to what you’re expecting. This weekend, that happened to me. Losing data is terrible, no matter what it is. To a bit of a perfectionist like me any loss of

Educating internet explorer users

2022-04-15
2 minutes

Internet Explorer was, in its prime, the most popular internet browser in the world. Originally released alongside Windows 95, its headline feature seemed to be that it was maintained by Microsoft and was automatically installed. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 2.0 in November 1995 that feature we’re used to, like

Backing up databases

2022-01-29
3 minutes

Lots of applications use databases to store data. It’s a fast and efficient way to store data, whilst also providing features like searching and integrity checks. Password manager, file storage, media library, RSS reader, almost everything will use some form of database. However, backing them up isn’t quite as simple

State of the Apps 2022

2022-01-01
14 minutes

It’s a new year, so it’s time to reflect back on the tools I used last year, how they’ll change this year, and how they might change in future. It’s still an idea I’ve completely stolen from CGP Grey / Cortex, but I think it’s useful, fun and interesting. I’m

Home Server 2022

2021-12-31
7 minutes

For the last 7 years or so, I’ve had some form of server sitting in my house. Its size and utility have changed massively in this time, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. Both prefer to and enjoy running a number of applications for myself, in a (possibly futile)

Server Setup 2022

2021-12-31
4 minutes

The cloud is just someone else’s computer. In my case, the cloud is usually just my computer. As an avid self-hoster, I like to run a lot of things myself, for learning, privacy, and of course fun. And it’s hard to host anything without servers. I have quite a few

Upgrading Databases in Docker

2021-12-23
4 minutes

For me, every Monday is updates day. I run through all the entries in my Ansible hosts file and install any updates which may need running. All machines have OS updates, and the handful which run docker get their containers pulled. However, pulling containers merely updates the underlying container OS,