today's howtos
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University of Toronto ☛ Stand-alone downloads of program assets has a security implication
I recently read Engineering for Slow Internet (via), which is about what it talks about and also about the practical experience of trying to use the Internet in Antarctica (in 2023), which has (or had) challenging network conditions. One of the recommendations in the article was that as much as possible you allow people to do stand-alone downloads with their own tools for it, rather than forcing them to download assets through your program (which, to put it kindly, may not be well prepared for the Internet conditions of Antarctica). In general, I am all for having programs cope better with limited Internet (I used to be on a PPP dialup modem link long after most people in Canada had upgraded to DSL or cable, and it was a bit unpleasant), but as I was reading the article it occurred to me that supporting people getting assets your program will use through their own downloads can change the security picture of your application a bit, possibly requiring additional changes in how you do things.
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Doug Brown ☛ Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 10: RTC
I’m going to start this post off with the obligatory list of links to the previous parts in the series if you’re new here and are interested in seeing the full story: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. This is the tale of how I upgraded my Chumby 8 to run a modern Linux kernel.
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Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Even more Opentelemetry!
I continue to work on my Opentelemetry demo. Its main idea is to showcase traces across various technology stacks, including asynchronous communication via an MQTT queue. This week, I added a couple of components and changed the architecture. Here are some noteworthy learnings; note that some of them might not be entirely connected to OpenTelemetry.
Here’s an updated diagram. New components appear in violet, and updated components appear in green.
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HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 24.04
MediaWiki is an open-source wiki software written in PHP and MySQL. It is scalable and extensible wiki software-powered sites like Wikipedia and Wikimedia. MediaWiki can be used as a collaboration and documentation platform. It allows you to organize documentation and make it public for everyone. It supports multilingual and offers customization for different aspects, from theme/skins, plugins, and editors.
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Naman Sood ☛ Fixing sleep on Linux on a Dell Latitude 7290/7390/7490
In my case, this involved adding these flags to GRUB_LINUX_CMDLINE_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub, then regenerating grub.cfg with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. These instructions might vary according to your distro.
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Luke ☛ How to Copy a File From a 30-year-old Laptop - Unterminated
Remember, it comes from a time before the Internet was mainstream. HTTP, the protocol underpinning the modern Internet, wasn't finalized until 1996. Software for connecting to a dial-up provider would have been available at the time, but was never installed. However, the laptop does have a phone dialer application, which gave us our first clue towards a potential solution.
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ID Root ☛ How To Install Joplin on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Joplin on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Joplin is a versatile and open-source note-taking application that offers a robust alternative to proprietary software. It supports Markdown, enabling users to format their notes efficiently, and provides synchronization capabilities with cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Nextcloud.
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TecAdmin ☛ How to Install and Configure PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 24.04
PostgreSQL is a powerful and popular open-source database management system. It is known for its reliability, robustness, and excellent performance. Many developers and companies use PostgreSQL to store and manage their data because it supports advanced data types and performance optimization features.