Bluetooth connection issues on Slackware 15.0

I wanted to enjoy a lazy Saturday morning by listening to some black metal on my Slackware 15 installation. However, before I could get to that, I had to connect my Samsung soundbar to my Slackware machine over Bluetooth. Unexpectedly, after establishing a connection, the devices immediately disconnected.

Proxmox VE and the case of an unresponsive GUI

For the second time this year, our old FreeNAS storage platform went offline and left our Proxmox VE 6.4 servers in a continuous state of distress. This issue renders the Proxmox VE GUI unresponsive and thus unable to display information about the virtual servers it’s running.

Unable to update device firmware: fwupdx64.efi cannot be found

I can’t remember ever having an issue with updating the firmware of my XPS 13 7390 on Ubuntu. Today, however, Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) decided to throw an ugly-looking warning in my face after proudly proclaiming that it had a new device firmware update ready to be installed. To add insult to injury, Ubuntu told me to reboot the system to install the new firmware, after GNOME Software correctly informed me that it had failed.

The Mozilla Observatory has become an embarrassment

I find great value in much of Mozilla’s technical documentation and resources. However, the current state of the Mozilla Observatory can hardly be described as anything other than an embarrassment. I believe it’s high time the people behind the project start to eat their own dog food.

How did a subdomain on cancer.org end up serving porn?

A few days ago I discovered several referral spam links to the domain servicematch.cancer.org in my server logs. Spam referrals are usually a part of some blackhat SEO campaign used to generate traffic, and if possible, get the URL listed on a website’s public statistics page.

Content warning: This article contains mildly sexually explicit text and images.

Onionsite has disconnected

With the release of Tor Browser 11.0, I remembered that I have an onion site so I figured it was a good time to see how it was doing. However, I must have been sleeping in class because the Tor Browser informed me that the site was most likely offline.

How does my IPFS hosted website stack up against my static site

Last year I spun up a new VPS and deployed my own IPFS node with an HTTP gateway. I used DNSLink to map the domain name paranoidpengu.in to the latest version of my website hosted on IPFS. The performance was seemingly impressive when serving content from the local repository, but how would it compare to serving static content.

Fedora implements precognitive technology

If your Fedora Linux installation had only one hour left to live, where would you go and what would you do? Welcome to another brand new installment of my adventures in enterprise Linux’ing.

.BUZZ TLD - How to swat a spammer

So .buzz is another one of those new gTLD’s that saw the light of day during ICANN’s “show me the money” run back in 2013. It’s managed by dotStrategy, and it’s advertised as a great domain name for generating buzz around your product.

Systemd journal corruption on Fedora

I always keep a terminal window open to monitor system logs in real-time when I’m in front of my computer. Therefore, it immediately caught my attention when the systemd journal offered zero new lines of output. The most recent entry simply contained information about the previous shutdown.

Njalla goes TITSUP and paranoidpenguin.net gets wiped off the clearnet

It’s always DNS, right? Well, at least that appeared to be the root cause today as Njalla’s DNS servers became unresponsive. I don’t know how this could happen with anycast DNS, but regardless, every service went offline. My initial concern was that the unscheduled downtime could be the result of actions taken by law enforcement.

Why can't I change the default output sound device on Ubuntu 20.10?

Today I struggled with an annoying issue concerning the sound system on my Dell XPS 13 7390. Ignoring whatever output sound device I selected, Ubuntu would instead play the audio directly through the built-in speakers. To quote what I regularly hear from my users, “it worked yesterday, and I didn’t change a thing!”

Sex, drugs and no-reply@sharepointonline.com

Is there anything more annoying in this world than dealing with Microsoft support? You might assume that Microsoft would appreciate reports detailing the abuse of its services or even act upon that information. But alas, in both cases you’d be wrong.

Content warning: This article contains mildly sexually explicit text and images.

ParanoidPenguin.net goes decentralized with IPFS

As a longtime believer in a decentralized web, I’m glad to finally have been able to put this blog on the InterPlanetary File System. It’s been a fun little side project, and it allowed me to cut my teeth on IPFS.