Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days. It’s even sucking the last drops of blod out of the wasteland that is this blog. How arrogant of me to believe I was writing content for humans, when in fact, a battalion of AI bots are my only constant readers.
I’m already coming up on my sixth anniversary with Hugo. Wow, time really does fly. I feel like sharing some of my experiences with Hugo and how it compares to my previous long run with WordPress.
When Unstoppable Domains launched its service I was among the early adopters to pick up a .crypto NFT domain. It was a decision based on curiosity without any real expectations of usability or value. My .crypto NFT has been idle for years due to increased Ethereum fees. However, fast forward a few years until the present day, and I’m getting a warning that my password is insecure when trying to log into its service.
At the end of last year, I decided to move my email server to Contabo. This came to be after being enticed by the “too good to be true” prices and specifications of its VPS offerings. I have great faith in German businesses, but in retrospect, I should have done a bit more research before hitting the deploy button.
After spending the majority of my personal computing adventures on my MacBook Pro last year, I received my final deprogramming session with the latest batch of macOS updates. Surveillance tech has now festered deep inside macOS Sequoia itself with the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple’s promises of groundbreaking privacy protections aside, I employ a strict zero-trust policy when it comes to accessing my personal data.
The rclone mount command worked without throwing any errors, and I could browse all my files from the local directory. However, when loading up my music collection with VLC, I got that little annoying spinning beachball of death. The reason appeared obvious going by rclone’s error log:
When I deployed my email server with DigitalOcean five years back, it delivered at a competitive price and performance. A few years later, the same server has gotten a price hike but no upgrades or resource increases. Even so, hosting your email server is not for the faint of heart, and IP reputation is a big part of the game. Therefore, I stayed with DigitalOcean until the depletion of resources finally forced my hand.
A couple of years ago Disney released a new series based on the classic Willow movie. The show had everything you’d come to expect from Disney: Strong independent women kicking ass. A beautiful young prince in distress. And a band of silly bickering men for comic relief.
It continued none of the magic from the movie, except from Warwick Davis himself. Regardless, I was planning on finishing the show, one day, eventually.
StackSocial, an online marketplace owned by StackCommerce is seemingly always running the deal of a lifetime on Windows 11 Pro. StackSocial is offering the software with a retail value of $199 with 89% off. Reputable technology websites like ZDNET, CNET, Android Police, Cult of Mac, and PCMag are running commission-based promotions on Microsoft Software from StackSocial.
After my improbable love story with the MacBook Pro M1 I have descended further into madness. Awed by the ARM architecture of the MacBook Pro, I decided that I needed to get my paws on one of those new Windows ARM-based Copilot+ PCs. Being a longtime fan of Dell’s XPS product series, I bought the XPS 13 9345 Snapdragon® X Elite X1E-80-100.
For reasons that currently escape me, I bought a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro during a black Friday sale back in 2021. After feeling somewhat discouraged with the latest offerings in the Enterprise Linux world, I decided it was time to unwrap the MacBook and have a closer look at macOS. Now, six months later, I thought it would be fun to look back on this journey and maybe get an answer to the dreaded question: Is macOS better than Linux?
After logging into my Hetzner account, I was met with a message informing me that my current cloud server plan was being deprecated. I could either choose to keep my existing server plan or rescale it. In my experience, this approach is usually a disguised upsell attempt, but thankfully not so with Hetzner.
Finding a solid and reliable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that you can trust is not a task to be taken lightly. For iOS, my choice has been the open-source application Raivo OTP. However, after yesterday’s automatic update, I no longer have my OTPs.
After my recent rant about Enterprise Linux, the company where I work became a SUSE Linux partner. Therefore, I’m giving Enterprise Linux another go. After initially looking at SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), I decided to go with SUSE’s rolling offering, Tumbleweed.
The Nginx mainline branch (currently version 1.25.3) has implemented support for HTTP/3 and I want it on my server. The first order of business will be to switch from the nginx stable branch (currently version 1.24.0) to the mainline branch. As Arch Linux provides both Nginx branches in their repository, it’s just a matter of performing a quick drop-in replacement.
I temporarily return to Fedora and am welcomed back by more breakage. The first thing I did after updating and restarting my Fedora laptop was to fire up the Cider app to connect to Apple Music. It immediately croaked with its dying words being Skia shader compilation error. That felt eerily familiar, as I remember facing the same problem on Fedora a few months back.
This is not another post about the never happening “Year of the Linux desktop”. I’ve been running GNU/Linux on my desktop for more than 20 years without ever believing the grass was greener on the other side. However, three years ago, I reluctantly replaced my Slackware Linux installations with the offerings from Linux Enterprise providers Canonical and Red Hat.
Since the end of last year, most of my backlinks have originated from websites without any relevant connection to my content. However, they’re suspiciously similar, identified by the suffix of the referring URL being -k.html. Another distinct feature of the backlinks is that they’re only targeting (as in hotlinking) images.
Earlier this year, Canonical decided to advertise the arrival of Ubuntu Pro by hooking up the following message in the terminal as users were issuing apt update: “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled: (list of vulnerable installed packages)”. Predictable for anyone but Canonical, confusion ensued.
During an issue with a defective storage solution, I had temporarily (as in not added to fstab) mounted an external USB disk under /mnt/usb-disk on a Proxmox server to keep the backups flowing. A day and a reboot later, those backups started to fill up the local storage instead with unfortunate consequences. As they say, you really can’t fix stupid.