Ben Thompson* (temporary paywall) makes an excellent first-order analysis of Elon Musk's bid to acquimerge SolarCity with Tesla. But he, uncharacteristically, stops short of seeing the mid- and long-term reasons for the acquimerge. It's about SpaceX. It's about Mars. It's about the Moon. Musk knows that he needs an incredibly-solid pipeline of technology to get …
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there is no such object on the server
Gee. Thanks, {{Active Directory}}. This is one of the more useless error messages you can get when trying to programmatically access AD. Feel free to Google (or DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whomever) that error message. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Your eyes bleeding, and gray matter leaking from your ears yet? No? Then you obviously didn’t …
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new service – free, secure password generation
Today, I am formally announcing a brand-new service / website for secure password generation. Go visit password.cf Get yourself random passwords of commonly-required lengths and complexities*. Password Varieties: 4 of 4 upper & lower alphanumeric lower alphanumeric Lengths generated: 12, 16, & 24 characters Visit the {{GitHub}} project page .. .. if you want to …
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turn on spf filtering with postfix and centos 7
After running my new server for a while, I was noticing an unusually-high level of bogus email arriving in my inbox – mail that was being spoofed to look like it was coming from myself (to myself). After a great deal of research, I learned there is a component of the {{DNS}} specification that allows …
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helping a magpierss-powered site perform better
I rely on MagpieRSS to run one of my websites. (If you'd like to see the basic code for the site, see my {{GitHub}} profile.) One of the drawbacks to Magpie, and dynamic websites in general, is they can be bottlenecked by external sources – in the case of Magpie, those sources are the myriad …
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how did i never know about .ssh/config?
I’m sure folks have tried to explain this to me before, but it wasn’t until today that it finally clicked – using .ssh/config will save you a world of hurt when managing various systems from a {{Linux}} host (I imagine it works on other platforms, too – but I’ve only started using it on {{CentOS}}). …
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wordpress plugins i use
As promised last time, I now have a page dedicated to the {{WordPress}} plugins I use. Check it out, here.
use prettypress if you’re running a wordpress blog
Like my list of used Chrome Extensions, I’m building a list of recommended {{WordPress}} plugins. But until I get it done, I have to give some pretty big props to PrettyPress. It’s a plugin that lets you edit in Visual, Text, and {{Markdown}} – the markup format of sites like reddit, {{GitHub}},, {{GitLab}}, and the …
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a couple months late – but my prediction was pretty close
Tesla’s Model 3 is debuting at $35,000. That is distinctly in the range of most “normal” people to obtain. It should be shipping sometime in 2017. I’d buy one.
improve your entropy pool in linux
A few years ago, I ran into a known issue with one of the products I use that manifests when the {{Red Hat Linux}} server it’s running on has a low entropy pool. And, as highlighted in that question, the steps I found 5 years ago didn’t work for me (turns out modifying the t …
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can you disable encryption on a windows server?
This was asked recently on Server Fault. I’m asking if there’s a way to prevent files from being encrypted. I’m referring to some extent to ransomware, but specifically I want the following scenario: Windows File server w/ shares (on the E: drive) I want a way to tell the above server “don’t allow files on …
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Haggai 2 (NRSV)
{Haggai 1} In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai, saying: Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of …
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how to turn a google+ community into a quasi “mailing list”
Spurred by a recent question from an acquaintance in town, I asked on Google+ whether or not you can enable emailed notifications for a Community. This led to the elaborate Settings page for G+. It turns out that if you combine enabling a Community’s “Community notifications” (under the specific Community’s settings (which you find by …
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Haggai 1 (NRSV)
In the second year of King Darius, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest: Thus says the Lord of hosts: These people say the …
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more ad blocking extensions
The list of ad blocking extensions I have installed has grown. Add to the previous two these two: Adguard uBlock
an even cleaner facebook most recent feed
Several months ago, I wrote-up a brief how-to on just showing the most recent news feed on Facebook. I added a new Chrome extension today that helps speed-up your Facebook experience – Facebook Flat. It makes your Facebook views “flat” from a design perspective (no pun intended, but the extension falls a little flat when …
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Haggai begins
After finishing Acts last Saturday, we are moving into the post-exhilic prophets, starting with Haggai. It promises to be yet another engaging time of study for my men’s group.
on ads
My colleague Sheila wrote a great, short piece on LinkedIn about ads recently. And this is what I commented: I held off for years in installing ad blockers/reducers. But I have finally had to cave – been running Flash in “ask-only” mode for months now, and just added a couple blocker/reducer extensions to Chrome recently …
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putting owncloud 8 on a subdomain instead of a subdirectory on centos 7
After moving to a new server, I wanted to finally get {{ownCloud}} up and running (over SSL, of course) on it. And I like subdomains for different services, so I wanted to put it at sub.domain.tld. This turns out to be not as straight-forward as one might otherwise hope, sadly – ownCloud expects to be …
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ending Acts
We started in August of 2014. And tomorrow we *think* we shall finish, as we read and discuss chapter 28. We don’t meet quite every other Saturday – but it is close 🙂
automated let’s encrypt ssl certificate renewal on centos 7
In my how-to for Let’s Encrypt, I gave an example script that can be called via cron (or manually) which will renew Let’s Encrypt {{SSL}} certificates under {{CentOS}} 6. If you want to do it on {{CentOS}} 7 (which is what I am now running), use the following: cd ~/letsencrypt git pull systemctl stop httpd.service …
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it’s been 4.5 years
Since I last changed hosts. I’m sticking with the same provider, but making a pretty big jump – from {{CentOS}} 6 to 7, from 2TB to 4TB storage, and 16GB to 64GB RAM. Theoretically, you wouldn’t know this had changed at all unless you happened to catch it in the few seconds between DNS pointing …
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ssa, meet irs; irs, meet ssa
As you know, we adopted our second son last year (which finalized in Dec – woohoo!). A couple weeks ago, we received Zeb’s birth certificate (which needs to be processed after an adoption), and applied for his SSN. Earlier this week his brand spankin’ new SSN card arrived – so I got down to finishing …
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above the cloud storage
Who wants to go into business with me? I’ve got a super-cool storage company idea. Load up a metric buttload of cubesats with radiation-hardened {{SSD}} storage, solar power, and [relatively] simple communicaton stacks (secured by {{SSH}} or {{SSL}}, of course), and launch them into orbit. You think cloud storage is cool? What about above-the-cloud storage? Pros: …
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meetings
The author of a recent Medium post is so close to right, it’s scary. Gary says the best thing you can do is to cut your meeting length in half. And that is a phenomenal step. One that needs to happen. But one that needs to happen in conjunction with an even more monumental shift. Change the start time …
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