It was rather surreal when I realized I had actual valid SSL/TLS certificates for the primary GitHub domains. Https is supposed to prevent eavesdropping, yet with these keys, I could become a man-in-the-middle with relative ease. Let me take you back to the beginning and walk you through how I acquired these certificates from the certificate authority WoSign. StartSSL As the owner of this website…
I love Mint.com . I've been using it for over 5 years now , and it has helped me keep track of multiple bank accounts and credit cards, giving me one simple location to manage my finances. One useful feature is the categorization of transactions. Mint lets you set up budgets based on categories and sub-categories. It has a nice graph showing how far along you are in the month in relation to your…
Drupal at MSU Libraries Drupal has become a big part of my job in the last year and a half. We have moved our public facing website over to Drupal 7 from a home-grown java based site. It has been fun to learn Drupal, teach other people how to manage their own pages, and learn how to administer the site. I've written a few modules here and there, but one of the biggest things I've done is set up…
There are plenty of great online backup services that give you a limited amount of free storage. The most well-known is Dropbox , which gives you 5 GB of storage for free. Google Drive gives you another 5 GB, and Microsoft's SkyDrive gives you 7 GB. Other less known places may give you more, such as ADrive with 50 GB or Shared with a whopping 100 GB. All of these services of course have paid…
A couple weeks ago, I ran across an amazing deal for a cheap 7 inch android tablet. I had been thinking about getting a tablet, but hadn't bitten as I'm saving up for other things at the moment. However, this particular tablet was $20 after rebate, so I couldn't pass it up. When it arrived, I was surprised and pleased to find ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich aka Android 4.0) installed, and the tablet was…
I was surprised to find the other day that my new blog already had comments. The comments turned out to be spam, and I deleted them right away. Thankfully, I have already turned on comment moderation, which means all comments must be approved by me before being shown to other users. I imagine if the site were to grow, comment moderation would become a chore, but for now, it is a small price to pay…
This website now has a valid Class 1 SSL Certificate! And this came at no cost (monetarily) to myself, thanks to www.startssl.com. StartSSL gives away free Class 1 certificates to anyone who wants one and can verify ownership of a domain. This wouldn't be a big deal in and of itself, as you can easily create your own certificate authority, site cert, and private key. The reason it is important is…
This was originally posted on my first attempt at a blog, which has since disappeared. It was posted on September 15, 2011. I really like my nook. It hasn’t been used much recently because I got an android phone, but it still is my favorite tool for reading books. As someone who loves tinkering with computers, I naturally rooted my nook the day after I got it. Having read all about the things one…