Computers exist for doing work, usually useful, often not. In rare instances, it's useful to make a program do nothing at all. My primary use case for this is Docker containers, where it's useful to have the container do nothing, so it can be exec-d into as part of another…
GitHub, my public code hosting platform of choice (I have my own Gitea server, too), has GitHub Pages, a free static file hosting platform. I use GitHub Pages for a few personal projects, where I either don't need or want to host the code myself, or I want to explicitly…
If you look at any software project, its codebase is rarely just the application itself. There's always a few other things in there: Tests (hopefully), linters, complicated setup scripts, incredibly complicated compile scripts. All of which take a lump of code and turn it into a full project. To make…
Using an ORM adds a handy layer between you and the database tables. Sure, you can write SQL, but most developers find it easier to think of a list of complex objects than they do a collection of rows. However, it's important to remember what's going on under the hood…
I've never been a huge fan of cameras inside my house. The idea of a network-connected camera lens pointing around my house doesn't fill me with very warm feelings. However, as time goes on, the value of being able to be nosy on my own home when I'm not there…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…