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Sunset on Mars is Blue! (found underside the cap of a popular drink) A woodpecker’s tongue circles its head, protecting its brain from the force of repeated pecking! Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada – (found underside the cap of a popular drink) The human brain struggles to process negative commands. When told “don’t think of an elephant,” your mind is forced to…
Assuming you have: pkgbase and 15.x FreeBSD server with a bunch of jails bastille as the jail manager and that the host and all jails are on pkgbase here’s a single command to upgrade them all in one shot. What does the command do: Upgrades the host. Finds and upgrades all jails. Restarts all jails thereafter. pkg update -f && pkg upgrade -y && ( set -e ; for jail in $( bastille list jail )…
Last updated 20 July 2026 Development of the BRZ A pair of vides explaining the rationale by Subaru engineers who developed the BRZ. Part 1 Part 2 The boxer engine, development, history, production Break-in period: Regardless of what the folks at the dealership say, after driving for about 2200 kms, the stick shift is smoother, there is less noise from the tires, from the engine as well and it…
If you are importing about 25GB of PST file into Outlook Classic, here’s some notes for you 1 . Remember to run scanpst.exe over the exported PST several times before you import. It’s usual for scanpst to take several passes. Go until it finds no problems. This is a good practice to do especially on large PSTs. Also remember to increase the size of the PST via registry updates to make…
Sometimes, you come across Windows machines that are crashing because they’ve run out of disk space. And even after you do the regular cleanup, it either fills up quickly or you need more space. Here’s something to add to your arsenal. A .dmp files Look for .dmp files. Use powershell to search for all dmp files and delete them. B .msp files There are these .msp files which are Windows…
This will be a compilation of windows scams. You can just copy paste the screenshots into an LLM to figure how to resolve them. 1 This screams at you to call the number shown in a loop. Appears inside the browser. 🚩 [web] · [in] · [fb] · [ig] · [x] · [tt] · [yt]
It’s a straightforward installation of NinjaOne 1 on a Windows box. On a Mac though, there are three permissions to enable. Here’s the permissions and the steps you can use to tell your client to follow so you get full access. 2 The three permissions are: Screen Recording, Accessbility, Full Disk Access and they’re all under System Settings –> Privacy and Security. Click on…
Now with OAuth2, you can quickly setup Thunderbird email client to use with Office 365. This comes in handy if you use the Microsoft Office Basic plan that comes without installed applications. There’s a caveat though. When you try to send an email, Thunderbird comes back with an error saying it cannot connect. There’s a lot of stuff written on the intertubes about how to solve them…
When you setup your email hosted on networksolutions.com, here are the instructions to configure Outlook (Classic). Open Outlook –> File –> Add account. Input your emal address and let Outlook handle it. If you’re lucky, you’ll be setup and asked to enter password. If not, go back, start again and the screen where you need to enter the email address, click “Advanced…
If your Office 365 mailbox is getting close to 50 GB and you’re considering enabling archive mailbox, read on. When you turn on archiving, technically called “In-Place Archiving,” it creates another mailbox in the user’s Outlook with its own calendar. And the most commonly cited assistance page does not really tell you about the split unless you thoroughly read it and click on the…
Sometimes you’ll come across Windows 11 computers that do not have the very handy “Microsoft Print to PDF” option in the list of printers to select. This option is very handy to save files as PDF and to split big PPDF by individual pages. Here are the steps you could try to get that option back and working. 1 2 Go to the search button on Windows, search for “Windows…
last updated 7 Aug 2026 Step 1: Purchase a low cost Windows license from here. . Apparantly, the ‘Retail’ key is more reliable than the ‘OEM’ version of the key. Step 2: On the machine to be upgraded, start Command Prompt with admin privileges. Run this: changepk.exe /productkey VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T. This will require you to reboot the machine and install the files…
I recently upgraded my nas from 14.x to 15-RELEASE and then converted to pkgbase because I just loved the idea of being able to do pkg update and pkg upgrade for all upgrades moving forward. After the upgrade, the version I was on was 15.RELEASE-p1. After about a month or so, when I noticed p2 was out, I ran pkg update and pkg upgrade , it still kept me at p1. Investigating, I figured when I ran…
I run immich on a very old dell laptop with 100mbps ethernet with USB connected disks for data. The disks are formatted ext4 and the dell runs fedora. (Immich doesn’t run on FreeBSD yet. :( ). When the disk was full, I wanted to use my FreeBSD server as the data drive over NFS. And retire the USB disks. This required copying about 500GB of data from the USB disk to my FreeBSD server before I could…
If you’ve had a VPS with Hetzner in Europe (very competitive hosting rates) and you’re a Tailscale aficionado you’ve probably used Tailscale and been unhappy with upload/download speeds in kilobytes when connected via Tailscale over SSH. It turns out one reason for the low throughput is that you use pfSense as your firewall, and it can be difficult for Tailscale to punch a hole through pfSense. As…
You just bought a shiny new printer, say an HP, and you want to set up Scan to Email so that when you scan from the multifunction device (printer/scanner), you receive an email with the scanned attachment. Nowadays, printer manufacturers ship printers with lots of software and often require software to be installed on computers. Installing software on individual machines can be tedious for a small…
After tuning for swap space by reducing MySQL memory usage , the other area to look into would be php_fpm settings. The settings are located here if you’re using a freebsd jail: /usr/local/bastille/jails/<your jail name>/root/usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf Edit the file so your last five values are like this: [ www ] user = www group = www listen = /var/run/php-fpm.sock listen.owner = www…
On a FreeBSD machine with a bunch of wordpress website jails that work with one database jail, the system might continuosly use up swap space if your VM has say 4G or less memory. If the swap is continuously increasing, figure what is using swap: top -o swap -n 20 And if it is a SQL process, open the following file, provided your db jail is called db0, you are using bastille as your jail…
I monitor my websites with UptimeRobot on the free plan. It’s good, the timer checks every five minutes and for most hobby projects, it’s more than enough. The monitor URLs were setup as for example, https://prasna.ca . A few days ago, I realized there was ‘database connection’ error but since I use redis and CloudFlare, simple curl commands give status 200 and we never…
This holiday season I read up on FreeBSD jails. I’ve always wanted to be able to setup secure and stable websites. And Jails were the answer. I’ve used Bastille as a jail tool, there are many out there and you can even do it without a tool, the FreeBSD handbook has enough to set them up. My architecture for version one was a reverse proxy for all website jails. Then each website jail…
After you’ve setup your FreeBSD box, having the box email you for all sorts of reports, cron updates etc is really useful. You don’t have to login to the machine to see them, you can get them in your email. With DragonFly Mail Agent, the setting of such an email system is quick and easy. Here’s the intructions: Prerequisites Replace nobody@gmail.com with your own email address.…
I run proxmox 8 on an old 2015 ish Macbook Pro. 16GB memory, silent, 500GB SSD, its a good machine. When Proxmox 9 came out, I wanted to upgrade it to 9. Proxmox has an upgrade guide. Followed it, everything went fine. After reboot and upon ssh, I realized, root was mounted readyonly. 1 A dmesg check revealed that there were a lot of hard disk read errors. Strange I thought. LLMs said the nvme…
I bought two Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB hard drives recently for my home nas. They’re considered great drives for 24/7 operation. I’m using them as mirrored ZFS drives in FreeBSD. One thing that took me by surprise was the noise of the disk! The first time I installed them and I was running them on a desk (yeah, too excited to place them in the case), outside the case, the noise was startling. I…
I recently installed Fedora and loved the CLI color combinations (vibrant!). I wanted to apply it to Ubuntu and Debian (Proxmox) servers so here are the commands, just copy paste it into your cli. 1 : The script #!/bin/bash # Apply Fedora-like CLI colors and prompt on Ubuntu # Backup existing configuration cp ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak.$(date +%s) # Append Fedora-style prompt and color aliases cat…
The following is the steps to connect a USB external disk to proxmox host and enable Time machine. The instructions work for macOS 10.13 → 15.7. 1 1. Connnect your USB disk and mount it lsblk # find your USB disk, e.g. /dev/sdb fdisk /dev/sdb # create GPT + one partition (n → enter → enter → w) mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 mkdir -p /mnt/usb-timemachine blkid /dev/sdb1 # copy UUID Edit /etc/fstab : nano…
If you’re like me, always running ssh to connect to servers and having to run processes and wanting to know what you ran earlier in one combined session, run tmux. No backgrounding of commands, no using nohup, and even if the ssh session breaks, which most of the time it does if you’re running something that takes a long time, tmux is the best. Running tmux is easy, just install and…
Say you have 30 (or any large number) different clips in a folder that you just want to combine (concatenate) based on the timestamps. You do not want to reencode them, just want to connect/combine them into one as if they were text files. The reason you do not want to re-encode them is that it’ll take a long time to process them and you might lose fidelity of the video if re-encode was not…
Last updated: 03 Jan 2026 The solution is a free software called Immich https://immich.app and you can run it at your home (or in a rented server somewhere) on an old machine with some USB drives or set it up on fancy stuff with RAID etc. There are four parts to it: Setup Immich Server Go watch the awesome video that Tailscale folks have produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guHoZ68N3XM Setup…
I keep a bunch of old hardware. The oldest one is a Toshiba Dynabook SS 2000 DS80P (circa 2001). But I digress. I also have a 2015 Mac stuck at Monterey. I’m always trying to see if my old machines can be used in any way so they’re relevant still today. While researching recently, I came across soemthing called Opencore Legacy Patcher (OLP) that allows you to install latest Mac OSes on…
I wanted to clone an external SSD at 256GB (source) with internal NVME 512GB (destination) using clonezilla. (It had freebsd in it). External SSD was connected via usb-c. The machine was a Dell XPS laptop. 1 Each time I ran clonezilla, it wouldn’t show me the external disk. However, lsblk showed it and to make matters worse, if I chose the image to disk option, the external disk would show!…
If you are setting up Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, you’re constantly having to check DMARC, DKIM and SPF values and then check if the edited values have propagated. Here’s a script that does just that. It even saves main zone records in a new folder with a symlink of the latest output. All output is saved. This script was developed with a large language model. Features…
If you want to quickly image a Mac’s hard disk (create an exact copy saved as a compressed file) and later restore it, Clonezilla is a simple and reliable choice. This method is especially useful for older Intel-based Macs where internet recovery can be slow or unreliable. Here’s how you do it. Preprequisites An external SSD or hard drive to store the image A USB drive to boot Clonezilla…
Back in 2006, when I was trawling the second-hand electronics stores in Akihabara, Tokyo, I found this extremely slim and light Toshiba laptop. I remember asking the owner about it and he said it did not work and did not have an operating system. Steve Jobs would not unveil a similarly thin and light MacBook Air until 29 January 2008. It ran Windows 2000 originally, it was okay with speed, then…
You bought Google workspace through a reseller (say Wix) but let it expire. Now you want to get a new Google Workspace account directly with Google but when trying to setup, you get an error, "This domain is already is use...." . If you don’t have access to the admin email, there are two good options: If you bought Google Workspace with a third party, you’ll have to…
We owned a My Book Live, with 1TB HD as a “fancy” NAS Drive probably released around 2012. Because Windows 11 now comes with default SMB 2.0 and upwards, you cannot use it unless you install SMB 1.1 (SMB 1.1 is insecure and old). I had some older 256GB SSDs and I wanted to replace the existing HD with the SSD and use it primarily to stream music from the drive. I also had saved a 3TB…
This is a checklist when you setup Google Workspace Email for your small biz so you cover the basics and fundamental security. The steps are in a chronological order for maximum speed. Preparation Ensure the domain has never been used with Google Workspace - ask client for verification. Google “remembers” if a domain was setup earlier and even if it wasn’t used, it still gets…
Just a cheatsheet for terminal commands on a mac. Find all updates softwareupdate -l Install all updates softwareupdate -i 👢 [web] · [in] · [fb] · [ig] · [x] · [tt] · [yt]
If you have folder names in Windows that start with a tilde (~), they cannot be easily copied or deleted or moved. Here’s the trick to remedy the issue. Run this: ren ~folder newfolder But if you have a lot of folders inside a folder that has tildes AND the folder name with tilde is the same, you need to do a search and replace. Here’s the script: for /r "c:\folderwithtildes" %F in ( .…
Starting with Macbook M1s, you cannot simply delete partitions in the hard disk. If you are one of those that installs linux and edits partitions, you might get into a stage where you cannot create/edit partitions anymore. Diskutil commands also will not help you. As a last resort, you might want to reset the hard-disk and its not easy as in the old models. To make matters worse, you’re…
Acer BIOS version R01-B1 has a bug where when you update the machine, Windows 11 will boot in safe mode because it cannot find the hard disk. The root cause of the problem is that, the BIOS update changes the storage driver to VMD which Windows 11 doesn’t seem to support natively, at least as of this writing. The solution is to hit DEL to go to BIOS –> Advanced –> Storage…
It’s well known that Microsoft Defender (all versions as of Dec 2024) require a Windows Professional license. Many users buy machines that have Windows Home. When we upgrade Windows Home machines to Windows Pro by buying an upgrade key, there are times when the upgrade misses out on installing some key components that are necessary to run the onboarding script for Microsoft Defender from…
Applications like Apple mail export contacts in VCF format. Outlook doesn’t understand VCF. So a conversion from VCF to CSV is required. Trying to upload the VCF file to Google will work but many incomplete or badly formatted contacts will be removed. This doesn’t bode well for data integrity. The best way to convert a VCF with thousands of contacts is to download the free ThunderBird…
What have diabetes, ozempic, high blood pressure medication etc. have in common with the most powerful venoms of animals in the world? Venoms saves lives! Crazy. Here’s the gift NYT article if you want to read it all it’s a long but very exciting read Some important points The discovery of exendin-4 (a peptide in Gila Monster venom) led to the creation of Ozempic and Wegovy. Unlike…
Defender for Endpoint is a wonderful cybersecurity tool that works in Macs and PCs and in PCs works with Windows Defender, other Defender flavors that Microsoft produces etc. It has the following benefits: Core Defender Vulnerability Management Attack surface reduction Next-generation protection Endpoint detection and response Automated investgation and remediation Microsoft secure score for…
If you’re migrating a large number of clients from Google Workspace over to Microsoft Office 365, there’s a bunch of software that allows you to do that. They require configuration but the task will be much more scalable, you’ll be able to move over hundreds of accounts with minimal time and hiccups. But if you’re doing only a handful of migrations and you have to install…
Let’s face it. You’re supposed to do important work but want to listen to some music you remembered on youtube and then get carried away into watching something more interesting, forgetting you have a job at hand. Kids with homeworks due are the most vulnerable :). One way to discourage this behaviour is to block websites like youtube or netflix if you have pfsense installed. Steps to…
This mesage appears when editing a draft email in outlook and generally when using IMAP with/without a flaky wifi. The solution is simple: Solution Open Outlook, File -> Options -> Mail. Uncheck all options under “Conversation Clean up”. Save, quit Outlook and restart Outlook. Workaround If you don’t want to or cannot spend any time tinkering as explained above, you can use the…
An update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor on 19 July 2024 caused about 8.5 million Windows machines (estimated) to hang and show BSOD (Blue Scren of Death). A fix was pushed out later that day but the machines that went down had to be manually fixed (as of this writing). Here’s a technical summary of what happened based on Dave Plummer’s video below: Falcon Sensor runs on kernel mode!…
Sometimes when you release upgrade freebsd, you might get the following error: Failed to load kenel ‘kernel’ can’t load ‘kernel’ can’t load ‘kernel’ Type ‘?’ for a list of commands… And the system doesn’t autoboot. In times like these, you’re supposed to select “Option 6” and select older kernels, boot the…
Commands: freebsd-update upgrade -r 14.1-RELEASE freebsd-update install shutdown -r now freebsd-update install shutdown -r now Notes: “14.1-RELEASE” –> You can use replace it with “14.2-RELEASE” or any other release in that format. Before running the final “shutdown -r now”, you might have to do an additional “freebsd-update install” if any…