Sys. Admin. Archives - Page 8 of 9 - How To Train Your Robot

2020-09-022020-09-02

Hacktoberfest is coming up!

Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:

Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
Tunesviewer
iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.

There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events

2020-08-222020-11-20

Back to School and watch out for security and your preinstalled sofware!

This may be a back-to-school like no other in recent history. Kyle Rankin, chief security officer of Purism, has an interesting article about privacy as schools start online this year. While many schools use Google docs or Chromebooks, it is important to use your school account which is legally not allowed to be tracking as much.

(If you do use Google docs for education please also check out Autocorrect remover which makes writing much better for English learners!)

2020-08-162020-08-16

Removing old PPA from Ubuntu for stability and latest features

Once in awhile a package hangs out at an old version even after a system upgrade or two. This can cause odd things like that software portion not working like it should. In my case, an old salbabix ios PPA that was long defunct as Ubuntu 18.04 and later have no problem just plugging in updated iOS devices.

2020-07-132020-07-17

What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app

What3words is an interesting alternative to sharing around long latitude/longitude numbers, instead share just a few words!

The first step to integrating the api is signing up for a free API key. Then require the library using composer – in the main project folder run:

2020-06-262020-06-30

One more way to fight COVID-19… with your computer!

There’s a lot of computing power into finding a solution for COVID-19, and Digital Ocean just featured a new way to get involved – make your own droplet (virtual computer) to run distributed computations.

2020-05-042020-05-14

Online learning conferences

While many of us may not be going to favorite programming conferences, there are some interesting upcoming conferences to watch or watch the videos:

Digital Ocean TIDE – Going on now, a bit like the AWS free conference – a bit of an infomercial.

Knime – still a few upcoming live dates coming up on this one and the previous sessions are up, explaining this powerful machine learning tool.

May you go fourth and program!

Update –

200 OK conference – tomorrow, May 15th

Enthusiastcon – 10min talks June 6th

2020-04-282020-04-28

FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence

Today the Wordfence developers announced the new fastorslow.com tool, a handy tool for seeing how fast your site is in various parts of the world. The Wordfence folks build a quite useful plugin used by many sites – and this one – to keep reduce risk of attack.

This new tool however can be used to see the performance of any type of public site and recommendations on speeding it up. It also would be a much easier way to time requests to a server like in the World Network Requests Measurement post.

2020-03-142020-03-14

Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests

In Ian Stewart’s book, Professor Stewart’s Casbook of Mathematical Mysteries, he writes about an easy way one might prove that the earth is not flat. His “easy” proof can be done by booking some flights and timing them… or, simply looking up actual flights from certain cities to other cities. If it is much much shorter for a certain flight from A to D while A to B to C to D in a nearly straight line is much longer, it’s effectively a proof you can go around the world without falling off…

2020-02-292022-07-24

Building a Linux App part 7: Building an Installer File

There’s a big difference between having that quick python script set up with a GUI, and having a full desktop or mobile app ready to click install. In this post I’ll show the steps to build a Python script into an installable application.

2020-02-102020-02-13

Google breaks all Google calendars for the public (Update: Fixed!)

As you may have noticed if you have Google Calendar anywhere on a public website, recently these went down – and are still down, for the general public. View a page with a Google calendar embed while logged out of Google (or try any other browser that is not logged in), and you will get a blank page. This has been reported with dozens of “me too” upvotes.