Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

Blog

Category: tech

Re: The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace

I saw an interesting article on The Universe of Discourse about The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace. I’m about thirty-five years into Unix shell programming now, and I continue to despise it. The shell’s treatment of whitespace is a constant problem. The fact that for i in *.jpg; do cp $i /tmp done […]

Firefox SEC_ERROR_OCSP_FUTURE_RESPONSE [fixed]

My dad had an issue with Firefox failing on certain sites with a “SEC_ERROR_OCSP_FUTURE_RESPONSE” error. He recently replaced a dead battery in his desktop computer. These batteries are used to keep time when the PC is off. These days generally you won’t ever have to replace it, since computers are throwaway devices now. They’ll fail […]

Finding and removing packages installed from non-standard repos in Ubuntu

Update: Oh, look, right in the nick of time: “Valve Steam through 2021-04-10, when a Source engine game is installed, allows remote authenticated users to execute arbitrary code because of a buffer overflow that occurs for a Steam invite after one click” As part of my big spring cleaning, as well as given all the […]

Shared folder on Virtualbox Ubuntu 20.04 guest fails with “No such device or address”

In an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine in VirtualBox, I could define a Shared Folder like so: And then mount it like this: mount -t vboxsf Projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/ Or with the equivalent fstab entry like this: Projects /home/fboender/Projects/ vboxsf defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 This fails on an Ubuntu 20.04 guest with the following error: /sbin/mount.vboxsf: […]

Lurch: a unixy launcher and auto-typer

I cobbled together a unixy command / application launcher and auto-typer. I’ve dubbed it Lurch. Features: Fuzzy filtering as-you-type. Execute commands. Open new browser tabs. Auto-type into currently focussed window Auto-type TOTP / rfc6238 / two-factor / Google Authenticator codes. Unixy and composable. Reads entries from stdin. You can use and combine these features to […]

multi-git-status can now hide repos that don’t need attention

I’ve added an “-e” argument to my multi-git-status project. It hides repositories that have no unpushed, untracked or uncommitted changes. Without “-e”: And with the “-e” argument:

Umatrix makes the web usable again

As happens with all media, once corporations join in because there is money to be made, things quickly devolve into a flaming heap of shit. The internet is no exception to this rule. With the coming of Javascript and DHTML in the late 90’s, ads soon started appearing on the web. Not long after, pop-ups […]

Why the EasyList DMCA takedown notice is perfectly valid (and fair)

There’s a story going around about a DMCA takedown notice filed against the adblocking list EasyList, causing them to remove a domain from one of their filters. As usual, lots of indignation and pitchfork-mobbing followed. It seems though, that few people understand what exactly is going on here. Here’s a brief history of ad blocking […]

Reliable message delivery with Mosquitto (MQTT)

I was looking for a message queue that could reliably handle messages in such a way that I was guaranteed never to miss one, even if the consumer is offline or crashes. Mosquitto (MQTT) comes very close to that goal. However, it wasn’t directly obvious how to configure it to be as reliable as possible So this […]

USB 3 interferes with wireless radio-controlled keyboards and mice

I bought an Intel NUC Kit NUC5CPYH as a replacement for my Raspberry Pi 2b media center and file server. One of the main advantages of the NUC over the Raspberry is that it has USB v3 ports, which greatly increases the throughput speeds to the external USB disks and doesn’t require me to have external power […]

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