Apparently, Microsoft gives the wrong link for their Bitlocker recovery key page on both the Bitlocker recovery screen on the device and on the Microsoft account web page.
Continue reading post "Broken Bitlocker recovery link"Computer posts
The installation of a new version of nodejs via MacPorts took nearly two hours.
Continue reading post "#3312"I successfully switched my regular Firefox profiles back from Developer Edition to regular edition by waiting for the version to update.
Continue reading post "#3305"Easily typed passwords
I came across an interesting Stackexchange question about easy to type passwords. It seems a useful consideration for passwords we have to type frequently. Reading through the answers got me to thinking about a solution that fits the criteria of easy / fast to type along with the general password criteria of easy to remember and some reasonable level of secure.
My solution considers typing style for determining ease and uses words and rules for making them memorable. It keeps to the rules from the question of at least one upper case letter, one number, and one symbol.
Continue reading post "Easily typed passwords"Ideas: compute furnace
Furnace with a powerful computer system providing the heat. Will use compute cycles for scientific research or other social or personal purposes, running things like BOINC, Folding at Home, crypto mining, or rented “cloud” usage. Fans or liquid cooling systems will carry heat to a traditional forced air or water boiler system to distribute the heat throughout the home / building. System will increase or decrease CPU usage based on thermostatic control.
Continue reading post "Ideas: compute furnace"I’ve been having trouble with IPv6 on my El Capitan Mac over T-Mobile’s network.
Continue reading post "#3267"I accidentally opened up my main Firefox profile in Firefox Developer Edition and now it won’t let me open it in regular Firefox.
Continue reading post "#3261"I spent some time playing with my Raspberry Pi’s this weekend.
Continue reading post "#3182"Custom logic for unattended upgrades reboot
The Ubuntu / Debian unattended-upgrades package has an option to automatically reboot as needed when it upgrades packages. It will do this without user input, at a chosen time. However, it doesn’t allow for any conditions beyond need and time. I found a need for more nuance recently, so I had to disable the built-in functionality and set up my own script on a cron job.
Automatically deal with conf changes using unattended-upgrades
For Ubuntu servers, I use the unattended-upgrades package to automate keeping the system and packages up to date. I recently noticed some of Cogneato’s servers showing packages needing to be updated for multiple days. When I looked in unattended-upgrades.log (in folder /var/log/unattended-upgrades/), I found the message “WARNING Package something has conffile prompt and needs to be upgraded manually”. Basically, there was a change to a configuration file and it didn’t know how to handle it.