I recently bought an Asus Laptop. I will be using this laptop while traveling and to work from coffee shops whenever the opportunity to do so arises. My desktop is running Debian Stretch (Stable) but since the hardware on this laptop is fairly recent, I decided to install Debian Buster (Testing) on it. In this blog, I’ll talk about how I set up the WIFI during the OS installation and post installation.
Continue readingAuthor: Abijeet Patro
Must use WordPress plugins for a technical blog
When I took a Droplet from Digital Ocean to host my server, I decided to give Ghost a shot. Using Ghost was a unique experience. It was minimalist and the editing experience was great. Unfortunately a lot of things like analytics, image compression, comments, advanced SEO, and code syntax highlighting were absent or took time to setup. The core team implement things fast and have a very aggressive release cycle, but theme developers are not able to keep pace with the changes and new features available. In addition, the default theme that comes with Ghost is not very apt for a technical blog.
I have hence decided to shift back to WordPress in order to utilize the large number of plugins and themes. This blog contains a list of plugins that I have installed and consider as must use WordPress plugins for a technical blog.
Continue readingOwnership and Borrowing in Rust
I’ve been having a lot of fun learning Rust. I’ve been going through the second version of the Rust book and have covered uptil chapter 6 – Enums and Pattern Matching.
One of the unique things about Rust is the Ownership system. I had some doubts understanding this. Searching on Google lead me to this little website – http://intorust.com/ that has some really cool videos explaining – ownership and borrowing.
The author, Nicholas D. Matsakis, has a lot of other interesting work that you can read at http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/
On another note, I’ve been pushing my Rust code to the repository here. I’ll be happy to receive any feedback.
Updating ghost-cli process name
Imagine you’ve created your new Ghost install but have set it up with the incorrect process name. The official documentation does not tell us how to update it, it just tells us that it can be set using the --pname flag during initial installation. Let’s look at how we can update the process name after we’ve installed our site.
Disinfecting a Windows machine
So last weekend my sister came to me with a slow performing Windows 8.1 Acer laptop. She wanted me to format it and install a new copy of Windows 8.1.
I’ve been using Debian for the last 3 years. Previously I was dual booting between Windows and Debian in-order to play DOTA 2 with my friends, but since Valve released DOTA 2 on Linux, I’ve had little reason to open my Windows installation. As you’d expect I didn’t have a Windows 8.1 setup disc or ISO lying around. I debated whether to shift her to a clean KDE based Debian machine and she agreed as long as her desktop looked nice but I changed my mind when I saw the software she was using –
- Cyberlink PowerDirector Pro
- Cyberlink PhotoDirector
- Bunch of free games
I’m sure I’d be able to find alternatives for the above, but it’d be too much of a learning curve for her, plus setting up a KDE machine from scratch would take some time.
I decided to investigate the reason for slowness, and possibly fix the problem itself. Upon further discussion with her, I found out that the laptop was not only slow, but was infected with some sort of a malware. She was getting permission errors while opening certain folders, and a lot of the folders were hidden.
Continue readingRenewing Let’s Encrypt certificate
Have the following command setup in my crontab to renew the certificate for this blog, and for the main website – thecurlybraces.com
30 3 1 */2 * /opt/letsencrypt/certbot-auto renew --pre-hook "" --post-hook "service nginx restart"
This causes the command to run, at 03:30 on day-of-month 1 in every 2nd month.
Output
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/thecurlybraces.com.conf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for thecurlybraces.com
http-01 challenge for blog.thecurlybraces.com
Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
new certificate deployed without reload, fullchain is
/etc/letsencrypt/live/thecurlybraces.com/fullchain.pem
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Congratulations, all renewals succeeded. The following certs have been renewed:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/thecurlybraces.com/fullchain.pem (success)
Running post-hook command: service nginx restart
Incase you want to add more domains to an existing certificate, use the following command –
sudo /opt/letsencrypt/certbot-auto --expand -d blog.thecurlybraces.com -d thecurlybraces.com -d bitsnpieces.thecurlybraces.com --pre-hook "" --post-hook "service nginx restart"
This assumes that you have only a single certificate. If you’ve more, you’ll have to use --cert-name. Read more here.
Just putting this here for reference, and with the hope that it might be useful for someone else.