A year is Earth’s annual marathon around the Sun, clocking 940 million kilometers at 30 kilometers per second. Gravity keeps us tethered, inertia keeps us moving, and Earth spends the journey tilting and spinning like it’s auditioning for a dance competition. This relentless motion doesn’t just define time—it fuels life. Seasons shift, cycles renew, and we’re reminded that even the most “stable”…
Google Analytics is free because you’re giving your visitors’ data over to Google. The GDPR has outlawed using it without getting prior explicit consent. How do you get that consent? It’s complicated. I’m not going to have cookie banners. They are ugly, intrusive, and just leave a lingering feeling of “Why do they need my data? I just want to read this stupid blog post.” I feel very uncomfortable…
Update: Apple Passwords just screwed up badly, so I went back to 1Password 😅 There will be a blog post on this soon. Now that my blog is alive again, I decided to follow all those other bloggers with a list of defaults (and not so defaults) on App Defaults , inspired by the 97th episode of the Hemispheric Views podcast . I’m a Mac user. I won’t be linking out to the Apple apps listed below that…
iCloud is the only major storage provider with the option for zero knowledge. All data is encrypted in transit and on the server; the difference is who has access to it all. With Advanced Data Protection (ADP), Apple takes itself out of the equation for most services. With standard data protection, several services remain recoverable (and accessible) by Apple. So why doesn’t Apple use Advanced…
Before the introduction of Dark Mode support in macOS Mojave in 2018, many websites had offered manual Dark Mode support with a JavaScript toggle. In principle, this method implemented a “Dark Mode Switch” somewhere in the UI. On click, the site would load a Dark Mode CSS alternative to switch colors using JavaScript. Persistence was offered through setting a cookie to remember the setting. This…
No one uploads their stuff via FTP anymore. Or at least they shouldn't. When you locally build your site with Jekyll , you end up with a finished generated site in the _site folder that you can simply upload to your web host. But instead of using SFTP to do this, we’ll be making it a little fancier. Let’s assume you have your host ready and can SSH into it. Deploying to a VPS The following script…
Scripting helps automate mundane things and make your life wonderful. Update 19-03-01: The script has been amended to support IPv6 as well and will allow access coming from your public IPv4 and IPv6 address simultaneously. I will also use CIDR notation for letting both addresses in, which is optional for IPv4 but mandatory for IPv6. Update 24-11-07: I am no longer running on AWS , and this script…
You can do search locally, it's much faster than server-side search if your dataset is reasonably sized. I’m serving this website statically, no exceptions. I’m doing this for security and performance reasons. But since I did want to have a search feature on here, I had to come up with something inventive. Google offers custom search for websites to search only that site’s domain, but my disdain…
I took a picture of a birb. Heavy with confidence, I would deposit my lumbering frame in the center of the room. My choice to go all static had been a good one. It was quite a serene scenery—nothing could touch me. There were website owners running around wildly, chasing WordPress security vulnerabilities 1 , while at the same time trying to plug holes, which the dubious free plug-ins they…
Note: This guide is from 2015 and now most likely broken. Use from it what you will, but consider yourself warned. For some reason, it brings me great joy to reinstall fresh Linuxes on my non-Mac systems. While my servers usually run Debian, my personal computers almost exclusively run Arch. Arch Linux is bleeding edge, rolling release and just awesome in general. The Arch Way requires you to do…