today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 10, 2024

• Trevor Morris ☛ Using a JSON API and iOS Shortcut to Update my Website

  In a previous blog post I alluded to finding a better solution for using iOS Shortcuts to post content to my website. Instead of manually opening up the content management system after triggering a share sheet action, I wanted to push the data directly to my website. I needed to make the following updates to achieve this improvement;

• University of Toronto ☛ One of OCSP's problems is the dominance of Chrome

  If you break the dominant browser, people notice and fix it; indeed, people prioritize testing against the dominant browser and making sure that things are going to work before you put them in production. But if something is not supported in the dominant browser, it's much less noticeable if it breaks. And if something breaks in a way that doesn't affect even less well used browsers (like Firefox), the odds of it being noticed are even lower. Something in the broad network environment broke OCSP for wget, but perhaps not for browsers? Good luck having that noticed, much less fixed.

• Anne Sturdivant ☛ CSS Color Modules and Changes, Part I

  I've been keeping my eye on the CSS Color Module 4 (and 5) landscape over the last few years. Frankly, the amount of information has been overwhelming and tough to nail down where to start. Perhaps you have felt that way too, or you've only dipped into parts of the "new shiny." In this multi-part series for WeblogPoMo2024 I want to cover what I'm learning about the new CSS Color Modules. This will build on and refer to many other articles, posts, and sources out there, and contain my own "tiny page" experiments in subsequent parts of the series.

  For this first part in the series, I simply want to wrap my head around the landscape by creating an outline, or rough table of contents, of how I see the topic. Each heading here could become its own post with "tiny page," or be broken down into several posts with many "tiny pages," as I see necessary when I come to that section. As some sections are larger than others, I can already see that happening for quite a few. Let's dive in!

• James G ☛ How I display blockquotes

  I have blogged in the past about how my website is the product of incremental improvements: tiny changes I make as I learn more about the web. For example, how I display the blockquote HTML element has changed as I have learned more about content presentation. This got me thinking that I should document some of the design patterns on my blog, noting how they work and why I have designed things in the way that they are. Herein begins a new series on that topic, starting with blockquotes.

• Tony Finch ☛ Introducing BIND9 dnssec-policy – Tony Finch

  Here are some notes about using BIND’s new-ish dnssec-policy feature to sign a DNS zone that is currently unsigned.

  I am in the process of migrating my DNS zones from BIND’s old auto-dnssec to its new dnssec-policy, and writing a blog post about it. These introductory sections grew big enough to be worth pulling out into a separate article.

• Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Improving my self-hosted scrobbling implementation

  All of the music data used to present artist and album grids and track charts on my site is now retrieved from Supabase on each build. It's much easier to add, modify or deal with artist and album metadata (and even update listen data if needed).

• [Old] Tailscale ☛ How NAT traversal works

  This may sound a little recursive: to communicate, first you need to be able to communicate. However, this preexisting “side channel” doesn’t need to be very fancy: it can have a few seconds of latency, and only needs to deliver a few thousand bytes in total, so a tiny VM can easily be a matchmaker for thousands of machines.

  In the distant past, I used XMPP chat messages as the side channel, with great results. As another example, WebRTC requires you to come up with your own “signalling channel” (a name that reveals WebRTC’s IP telephony ancestry), and plug it into the WebRTC APIs. In Tailscale, our coordination server and fleet of DERP (Detour Encrypted Routing Protocol) servers act as our side channel.

• University of Toronto ☛ All configuration files should support some form of file inclusion

  There are a variety of reasons why people wind up wanting to split up a configuration file into multiple pieces. Obvious ones include that it's easier to coordinate multiple people or things wanting to add settings, a single giant file can be hard to read and deal with, and it's easy to write some parts by hand and automatically generate others. A somewhat less obvious reason is that this makes it easy to disable or re-enable an entire cluster of configuration settings; you can do it by simply renaming or moving around a file, instead of having to comment out a whole block in a giant file and then comment it back in later.

• Chris Enns ☛ Phrase of the Day: Information asymmetry edition

  I didn't realize before today that there was a term for what I generally think of as being "I like to be a jerk want all the power, and want to hold information over you rather than share it in a way that would benefit everyone involved".

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Flutter on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Flutter on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, codenamed “Noble Numbat,” is the latest long-term support release of the popular GNU/Linux distribution. With its stability, security, and user-friendly interface, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has become a preferred choice for developers worldwide.

• Linuxiac ☛ How to Install Java on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS: A Step-by-Step Guide

  Learn to install Java on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) quickly with our easy-to-follow step-by-step guide.

• H2S Media ☛ How to install development tools on Amazon GNU/Linux 2023

  Want to use Amazon GNU/Linux 2023 for software development then you need the right tools to compile your program.

• H2S Media ☛ How to install Collectd on Amazon GNU/Linux 2023

  collectd is a small but robust system monitoring daemon in the open source category that collects system information periodically and provides mechanisms to store and monitor the values in a variety of ways.

• TechRepublic ☛ Cloning Tools: What They Are and How to Use Them

  You might be new to the role of administrator. Or, you might be new to the world of IT, servers, networks and data. Either way, there’s one tool that you must get to know because one day it could save your company, your data and maybe even your job.

• SANS ☛ Analyzing PDF Streams, (Thu, May 9th)