Sys. Admin. Archives - Page 7 of 10 - How To Train Your Robot

2021-05-22

Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP

Chances are you have seen a movie or book recently covering the topic of an EMP – an Electro-magnetic pulse from a faraway nuke that could cause outages and damage. While most of what you hear will either be dismissive of the possibility, or a horror story of years of electronic wasteland, the reality could be more in the middle and is something folks can prepare for, according to a US government publication linked in the documents section of the SHARES site.

The SHARES system is a HF long range ham radio service but there are several recommendations in the document that just about any civilian should be considering, not just radio maintainers and organizations:

2021-04-272021-04-27

In search of the best scientific calculator for Librem Phone/Pinephone

While many apps do run on Librem 5 phone, there are many yet to be fully working on the small screen. In this post we explore the various calculator apps for Linux and see which might best work as a student/engineer’s go-to calculator:

2021-04-23

Only a few days before T-mobile auto-opts-in advertising with your information

If you’ve been following the Purism mailing list you probably know now that on Apr 26 T-mobile will be able to use your data for “anonymized” advertising targeted to you. What does that mean for you and what can you do to opt out?

2021-04-172021-07-17

App development with Librem 5

Purism’s blog recently posted a new howto on building a Librem 5 app. If you have been wanting to build a Linux app this is a great time to start with both phones and desktops running your app.

2021-04-132021-04-13

Severe weather alerts with a simple Python script

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:

2021-03-072021-05-22

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 🙂

2021-02-272021-02-27

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.

2021-01-242021-01-24

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?

2021-01-232021-01-23

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…

2021-01-202021-01-20

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: