Spotify review
Since copying music to my iPhone is a bit of pain, I decided to stop being a dinosaur, and get into this new world of on-demand music streaming.
Regrettably, it seems that these services are really below alpha quality - and amazingly, manage to have millions of customers anyway (but hey, stuff is frequently made popular due to marketing and not due to good quality).
Using FreeOTP with Battle.net
Some battlet.net users have requested, over and over to use other apps as a battle.net 2FA. These include FreeOTP, Authy, and possible others (Google Authenticator, AFAIK, cannot be used since it lacks the ability to configure the amount of digits).
After some searching the web, I found out all the pieces of the puzzle are out there, but nobody built it entirely, so here goes!
Using letsencrypt with HKPK
HKPK (RFC7469) is a standard that tells browser to cache a certain TLS certificate’s signature, and validate that future visits use that certificate (or a defined backup).
I intended on enabling this on my servers, but since letsencrypt renews your certificates every few months, it would mean updating this setting on my nginx configuration. It also means that if something catastrophic happens (like a disk failure), the certificate would be lost, but browsers would still expect to see that same one.
I'm giving up on IM
I’ve been using XMPP as my primary IM protocol for years now. I’ve used a few other things on the side, but I’ve always advertised it as my primary mean of communication. And it’s really worked for a long time: lots of developers and people in FLOSS circles use XMPP, and Google Talk federated as XMPP too, so that worked for less tech-inclined users.
Start small, then grow
All of us developers who love what we do have started lots of side-projects.
And almost all of us have equally as many side-projects abandoned on some
workspace or projects directory, rotting, with no hope of every achieving
completion. New projects are dumped there periodically, into a pit of
abandonment and decay.
Introducing Todoman
Inspired on memo and khal, todoman is a simple todo manager, (or task manager), designed to take note and keep track of pending tasks, that runs as a cli application on almost any Unix-like system (this includes Linux, BSD and probably other OSs from the Unix family).
Open source your website
Unless your business’s value is actually on your website code itself, there’s little reason not to share your site’s code.
I understand why facebook or gmail won’t release the code to their site (I understand, without condemning nor condoning), but if you’ve got a blog, an institutional website, a three-page site that merely links to “download our app”, there’s little reason not to share the source with the public.
Opensmtpd and dovecot with a shared SQL database
This article will describes how to achieve a flexible and scalable email setup using opensmtpd and dovecot. For single-user or single-domain setups, this is an overkill, but feel free to read ahead, you may still find something useful.
Performing backups the right way
For years I’ve had a single task on my TO-DO list: backup photos. I had an awful solution years ago, and only recently did a permanent, proper solution.
Doing backups the right way means taking several items into consideration, and should not be done lightly. Trusting poor backup solutions will result in a false sense of security where you might loose everything suddenly, and not even realize it until it’s too late!