I have a Raspberry Pi 4B that I use as a mini home server and pi-hole. I love that I can block intrusive ads, have a secure vpn connection to my home network, and have backup for my music collection. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a fun little device and if you can get your hands on one, it has a lot of cool uses. (Note, if …

I've got a PiHole set up on my raspberry pi and have it connected to my home router. My ISP won't assign me a static IP address though it's pretty good about keeping the one I've got active until I reboot my router. For the most part that's been good enough for me but I wanted to finally get dynamic dns going so I …

I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a few years now. I like supporting an independent organization and have come to really appreciate the containers functionality which helps me segragate activity. One gripe I've had is that I much prefer the way Google Chrome handle's URL completion. When I'm in Chrome and …

So you're doing ruby development in 2019, eh? Good for you! Despite the rumors, Ruby on Rails is still a great way to get a project up and running. I managed to get the core of https://www.rpgbuddy.com up and running in a week. One of my clients is also still running Ruby and I need to upgrade them from an old 2.3.3 …

I was transitioning this blog from using Jekyll to Hexo. After comparing both, I feel I made the right choice. However, I almost started off on the wrong foot. Being unfamiliar with Node.js, I was reviewing the Hexo install instructions and the first thing it tells you is to install via: 1npm install hexo-cli -g I'm …

I bought this laptop with a touchscreen and occasionally find myself using it while surfing websites. Now with Chrome that worked just fine but with Firefox it tends to select areas of text instead of scrolling. That sucks! Fortunately it's quite fixable. You just have to modify the .desktop file (or launch from the …

Note that this article for local installation of Maria DB or MySQL. It's intended to help you get up and running with the database locally and is not intended as a production tutorial. If you need to use either in a production environment, please contact a professional. Step 1: update and install 1sudo apt update 2sudo …

I bought an HP Envy x360 and out of the box it works pretty well with linux. I've got Ubuntu 18.10 installed and have only had to tweak a couple of minor things. There is however, one big problem and that is the touch screen doesn't work. It might be the HP firmware (I am still figuring out how to update it in linux) …

01/2019 update: This doesn't seem to be necessary with the 4.20 kernel! I recently bought an HP Envy x360 13" with AMD Ryzen 5 and Vega 8 graphics. I'll get into why another time but one of the things that didn't work quite well had to do with the laptop freezing every once in a while. It seemed random at first …

I've noticed that particularly in Ubuntu Xenial, an apt-upgrade to mysql 5.7 fails. A standard re-install doesn't work for me so I've resorted to more extreme methods to get my install working. This is only suitable for development, mind you. Please do not attempt in production without full backups and supervision. …