If like many you have been starting gardens and planting rather than traveling and visiting in recent months, there is one important thing to consider lately – severe weather reports including frost on your crops. I noted there was a little red (!) alert icon on an Android weather widget, but there seems to be no such alert for desktop computer or Linux computer or phone. It is a fairly simple to make this alert though with a simple script:
Continue reading “Severe weather alerts with a simple Python script”Listening for a callsign on DMR with Hearham.live
These past few weeks have certainly been trying for some communities with power outages, winter weather and utility failures. Ham radio is a very good way to communicate in your local community, but what if lots of other people are on the local repeater? What if you want a notification if your child or buddy is calling you, but not every other kerchunk or distracting story on the local repeater? If you have a DMR digital radio and id and digital repeater nearby, the tools on Hearham.live may help – and help save your battery leaving a radio on all day 🙂
Continue reading “Listening for a callsign on DMR with Hearham.live”Upgrading PHP Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04
If you have ever installed WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04 or similar you may have noticed the WordPress warning in site health dashboard for the included default of old PHP 7.2. – “PHP is the programming language used to build and maintain WordPress. Newer versions of PHP are created with increased performance in mind, so you may see a positive effect on your site’s performance. The minimum recommended version of PHP is 7.4.” Furthermore if you do any experimenting with Laravel you may have issues because the latest Laravel 8 is only compatible with PHP7.3 and newer, among other changes.
Continue reading “Upgrading PHP Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04”Remember to Composer Update for Security and Updates
Laravel updates and updates to various PHP libraries come once in awhile with little notice to your web application, and no notice is shown, no auto update runs – unlike WordPress. Once in awhile a security update comes, so how might you test it?
Continue reading “Remember to Composer Update for Security and Updates”Setting private user home directory on Ubuntu
Recently it was announced that Ubuntu 21.04 will have private home directories. This would affect new users and new installs, but you can easily change this on your computer (or any Linux/unix computer) after checking your current setting…
Continue reading “Setting private user home directory on Ubuntu”Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:
Once in awhile a service may get compromised script or item in it – in a recent case, a Zoom link will actually take you to some random site as part of some sort of adware campaign??? However a closer look shows it is very important to test your links on email or sites:
The link I saw recently actually had a very odd looking script – script in a production service is generally minified sometimes, but won’t be oddly obfuscated or base64-encoded. The suspicious part of this script starts out in the <body> with an odd looking launchBase64:
Continue reading “Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:”New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()
This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):
Continue reading “New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()”FTP-able server with correct Apache permission settings
If you’re setting a local server you may want some trusted admins to upload to, one good way is the vsftp server. DigitalOcean has a good tutorial on it, but there are some odd issues.
Continue reading “FTP-able server with correct Apache permission settings”SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important
Much has been written about the recent SolarWinds hack – “Almost a cyber pandemic” that we may not know the true extent of for some time.
Continue reading “SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important”Cleaning up Python – and old libraries
Newer Ubuntu releases do not even pre install Python2, and after an upgrade and installing latest Python3.x included in the release, you likely have some old ones there too. Since you most likely will not be using the python2 unless you use some very old library, you can clean them up, clear a lot of disk space and use the “python3” / “pip3” command instead.
Continue reading “Cleaning up Python – and old libraries”