Zarino Zappia is a designer, coder and Internetologist based in Liverpool, UK. This is his blog.
Since I set up daily logwatch emails on my Ubuntu web server, I’ve noticed the disk usage slowly creeping up each day – starting at 25% in January, and now at 47%, 10 months later. Left unchecked, this would likely fill my disk in a year or two’s time. So I figured I should try to diagnose what was eating up the free space, and decide whether it could be stopped/reduced. I started by looking at…
If you followed my guide on Setting up a dockerised Caddy-based webserver on Hetzner Cloud you may now be wondering how to keep an eye on your server’s performance while you’re busy living the rest of your life. Maybe you want to check that the disk isn’t filling up. Or maybe—as I found a few weekends ago—you’d like to know when the kinsing/kdevtmpfsi malware has infected one of your Docker…
Apparently, just under half of all emails are spam . If you want to send emails from your web server (for example, system monitoring emails ) and you don’t want to pay for a third-party SMTP service like Amazon SES or Mailgun , you’ll need to take steps to avoid your emails being flagged as spam by your recipients’ email providers. There are three anti-spam measures that overlap: Sender Policy…
This blog—along with a number of other websites I run—had been hosted by Dreamhost since 2008. But last year, when they announced they’d now have to charge VAT on top of the $13/mth I was already paying them, I figured it was time to shop around for alternatives. It wasn’t just about price either – I was also increasingly uncomfortable with having my data stored in the USA, and as my needs had…
Last weekend, my broadband provider, Hyperoptic, offered to send me a new wireless router. They promised it’d be a plug-and-play swap. But, since I’m the sort of trouble-maker who does crazy stuff like actually changing my WiFi network name from the stock “Hyperoptic Fibre 4321”, I knew there’d be a wrinkle. Sure enough, when the router arrived and I started modifying its wireless settings to…
With Interrail currently offering 25% off their rail passes until mid-December , I figured now is the perfect time to finally polish off these notes from my recent trip, in case anybody else fancies taking a well-planned, stress-free holiday across Europe, with a fraction of the carbon footprint of flying. In this post: Planning the trip Not just trains! Booking What I took with me Bags Clothes…
Note: I started this blog post a few weeks before Cities Skylines 2 was announced (how’s that for timing?) but I expect people will be playing CS1 for at least a few years, while the DLC and modding scene for CS2 develops. So, hopefully, this post is still useful! Cities Skylines is a popular city-builder simulation game. And amazingly it works on Linux out of the box! Woo! But anyone who’s played…
A number of years ago, I upgraded from my original DS214se NAS to a more powerful DS218+, donating the DS214se to my parents to act as a Time Machine backup drive and video server. My parents live in the most beautful corner of Herefordshire. The one down-side of this location is very occassional blips in power supply (all the rural dwellers reading this will be nodding right now). Usually this…
Some of the most popular posts on my blog are the ones describing how I set up my Synology Diskstation many years ago. Things like setting up Time Machine , writing to HFS+ drives , and enabling SSH access and installing third-party software through ipkg . A lot has changed since then! Docker has become the de-facto way to run third-party software on Diskstations, and my setup (automatically…
Every now and then, a programmer, product manager, or marketing person will ask me how they can “learn design”. It’s understandable that they think I can help. The problem is, I learned the principles of visual design through osmosis, growing up in a household with two graphic designers as parents. I learned front-end web development through a decade of experimentation, back when “web 2.0” was…