I’ve updated my old notes on managing a certificate authority and turned my current usage into a GitLab project. If you are looking at using TLS certificates on a private network, this is a good starting point to learn more about the process and best practices.
Category Archives: Internet
Go by Example
I learn well by seeing an example and figuring out what’s going on rather than watching teacher led demonstrations or some other method. I’ve found Go by Example to be the closest thing to my favourite technical manual, the venerable Advanced Bash Guide. For me it’s a great quick reference to understand how apart of the language works when I first encounter it.
Password Best Practices
I’ve been doing a bit of research for a small project to update project management practices and to refresh my knowledge of 2019’s best practices.
This is a pretty decent high level summary of how to approach password strength.
I’m Inactive on Mastodon
I’m not much for social media, but on the off chance you want to connect with me, I do have a fairly inactive Mastodon account.
I may not reply immediately, but I do check in from time to time.
Don’t use ETS
The EFF has just published an article about why nobody should be using ETS. This is particularly timely given the recent finalization of TLS 1.3.
Using Certbot with Route 53 in Manual Mode
I’ve just written a quick and dirty guide on how to use Certbot on Debian 9 with Route 53. This is useful if you are trying to manage wildcard certificates and don’t want to, or can’t, screw around with managing the current state of the Route 53 plugin on Debian 9.
Without further ado: quay:wiki – Let’s Encrypt Usage Notes
ImageGlass Image Viewer
I just finished upgrading my old PC, Hrothgar. I’ve been using IrfanView since my university days as an image viewer, and while it’s still more than adequate, I decided that I’d use this as an opportunity to see if there’s anything else out there that I like.
Enter ImageGlass. I’ve only been using it for a day or so, but thus far there’s a lot to like and nothing that I don’t like. I’m not 100% certain if I’ll completely replace IrfanView, but I’m definitely leaning in that direction. I particularly like the customization options and the UI is clean and simple and it only uses about 12MB of memory on Windows 10.
Check it out if on the lookout for a simple, fast image viewer on Windows.
Seth Meyers
As a follow-up to: The Atlantic’s Endorsement of Clinton, I thought I’d share the article that drew me to The Atlantic’s website in the first place about the remarkable rise of Seth Meyers to become the foremost progressive comic satirizing this year’s presidential election.
I’ve not been a huge fan of Meyers until now, he’s certainly a good performer but I’ve not been an avid SNL watcher for a long time so I missed most of his heydey. But this year he has really done an incredibly job mocking Trump in his own unique style.
The Atlantic: Why Seth Meyers Can’t Get Enough of Trump — The Late Night host discusses the pleasures of satirizing the presumptive GOP nominee and the rise of topical humor on his show.
NHK World On Demand Sumo
Starting with this month’s tournament in Nagoya there is now an English language official web broadcast courtesy of NHK. This seems to be an experiment, so I’m hoping that they decide it’s successful. The quality of the programme is fantastic and as much as I’d like to see a bit more of the ring entering ceremonies and so on, I’m pretty impressed nonetheless.
You can check it out here, and if you’re a sumo fan who speaks English I really encourage you to!
Also, if you’re interested in more coverage, I suggest you to check out Jason’s All-Sumo channel on YouTube. He’s got great coverage of the domestic broadcasts in Japan and is just doing it because he loves the sport not to mention he seems like a nice guy!
So far, so good at ~100Mbps
After a few shenanigans with Rogers and Teksavvy, I managed to switch over to my cable Internet service yesterday. Thankfully the only issues were administrative. After 24 hours of service, I’m cautiously optimistic that my local segment doesn’t seem to be especially congested.
I’ve not quite cracked 100Mbps download speed in any of my tests, but I have been able to hit 98Mbps pretty consistently and I’m always hovering around 10Mbps up. My ping times seem to stay to between 10-15ms to servers hosted in the downtown Toronto core. This is up about 5-7ms from my DSL service, but I’m fortunate enough to have always had good ping times in artificial tests simply because of location and this doesn’t seem to be a showstopper. I guess I’ll know more when I get a chance to sit down and play a few online games.
Last night during the supposed peak usage period, I was only seeing a drop in download bandwidth of 3-4Mbps at worst and barely any difference in upload bandwidth at all. My latency did increase a little bit as well but never more than 5ms and most of the time it was closer to 1ms.
If this holds, then four times the bandwidth is a fair trade for not having the lowest ping on the server! I thought I’d share this in case anybody else is considering Teksavvy cable as I found it incredibly hard to find anything other than horror stories which were clearly a result of unique circumstances when I was researching the switch.
Here’s a link to my Speedtest results if you are interested in a bit more detail.