Ran into a seemingly commonplace problem (my docker-compose was hanging randomly) with an extremely unexpected answer (my system was running out of entropy)!
TL;DR: install haveged on your system
What is entropy? It’s basically the “randomness” on your machine from your interactions with it (keyboard, mouse, hard drive activity, web…
Windows 10 is getting closer and closer to the Linux world every day, and it’s hecking exciting.
One thing I needed to do recently was to send some files from an Ubuntu machine over to a Windows 10 machine. In the past, I would either install Cygwin or install an…
I recently started a Django project that used django-allauth to perform authentication based on Google accounts. One problem I encountered was how to limit who can actually log into the site. I didn’t want anyone with a Google account to be able to log in!
Google’s API does have provisions…
Microsoft Word has tons of little built-in helper functions that we take for granted every day (other than the obvious spelling auto-correct): smart quotes, em/en dashes, and widow fixes.
As much as people like to hate on Microsoft products, life would be much uglier if it weren’t for them. Microsoft…
On May 8, 2018, a new top-level domain (TLD) .app joins the Internet. I put in bids to get 4 of them.. and managed to score one of them!
Edit: I had planned to post this on May 8, but GoDaddy was so slow to put my last domain name…
Amazon’s raising the cost of Prime by 20%… am I even getting $120 worth of value from it? (TL;DR — No, I’m not, but I’m keeping Prime anyway.)
With the recent news that Amazon is upping their Prime membership fee from $99 to $119, several tech articles have come out…
Unlike English, smartphone keyboards are not well-optimized for Chinese input. “Swiping” was a new invention that made writing English words bearable, but for Chinese, it’s less than ideal.
For starters, Chinese “words” are too short and too similar for swiping to accurately decode. …
What happens when a server gets hacked? How do servers store username/password combinations?
All too frequently these days, we read a news article or receive an email saying so-and-so has been hacked and X amount of user/passwords have been stolen (among other things like birthdays, security questions, and even social…
Ah, the stressful art of creating a password… something “secure” but “easy to remember”.
XKCD did a pretty good job presenting a good, user-friendly method. I more or less follow that pattern now, but with a slight twist. While correcthorsebatterystaple is a very long password, it’s technically only composed of…
This is Part 2 of my “block chain social network” series of posts. Check out the previous post on this topic: Part 1 — An open discussion about a Facebook alternative based on blockchain technology
The hardest part of overcoming the behemoth that is Facebook is having enough features to…
