today's howtos
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The Siren Song of Set It and Forget It
The truth is I work with a lot of clients, many of which should know better, whom rely almost exclusively on legacy applications, operating systems and platforms to handle their work on a day to day basis. What makes matters worse is that these legacy tools have been integrated into workflows that they now consider to be sacrosanct despite the fact that over the last decade or two, far superior and far more efficient replacements have been developed.
But replacing these tools generally requires that end users change or adapt their workflows and they really don't want to do that as I discussed back in 2021's post "Spock Was Wrong: In Tech is is Easier to Create than to Destroy": [...]
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Reaching past our firewalls with WireGuard (some thoughts)
The appeal of WireGuard for this is that it's a lightweight service that requires little configuration or operation, and is now supported across all of our Ubuntu fleet. This creates two obvious options, depending on how much work we want to do on these external machines. The first option is to run WireGuard in a non-routed, "point to point" mode on each of the internal machines that have services we want to provide access to. The internal machine would expose its service(s) on an private WireGuard network as well as its normal IP address (in many cases this requires no service changes), and external machines would reach the service by talking to the internal machine's private WireGuard IP address. The one drawback to this is that it requires configuring each external machine to use the appropriate magic WireGuard IPs for these services, instead of the hostnames we normally use.
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Day 2: logical properties
Logical properties are a new way of working with directions and dimensions, one that allows you to control layout through logical, rather than physical mappings. This is especially useful, if you’re dealing with websites that are presented in different languages and writing modes, like right-to-left.
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Day 3: logical property shorthands
If you use a shorthand property like margin with all 4 values, the properties will always be applied in the direction top - right - bottom - left, no matter the reading direction.
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Simple Group Theory
The formal definition of a group and a short proof: A group is a set G with a binary operation on G that satisfies these four axioms1:
Associativity: For all a,b,c in G (a • b) • c = a • (b • c)
Identity: There exists an element e in G such that, for each a in G e • a = a and a • e = a
Inverse: For each a in G there exists an element b in G such that a • b = e and b • a = e, where e is the identity element.
Closure: For each a, b in G, a • b and b • a are contained in G.
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Getting Started With Rootless Container Using Podman
Are you deploying software using containers? Are you using Podman? Do you want to up your security game by running containers with as little privilege as possible? Boy, do I have an article for you!