Everyone (okay, everyone this is relevant to) knows what SMTP is, the standard for mail transfer. It’s even in the name, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is how mail servers have been sending mail to other mail servers since… a while. Well, fun fact, there’s another protocol that accomplishes the same goal: QMQP, the Quick Mail Queuing Protocol.
Continue readingSo I’ve talked a little bit about VPNs before, but I didn’t go into too many details. Here’s a look into the top 5 common VPN protocols, and how they work: SSTP, L2TP(/IPsec), IPsec, WireGuard, and PPTP.
Continue readingFf you’ve dealt with email for any longer than 5 minutes (as an administrator), you already know it’s a mess. There’s so many security measures, so many checks, so many things to combat bad actors and spam. What if we had some way to have some service publish a list of bad DPs, and mail servers could quickly check that mid-transaction so they can have up-to-date information as to if the in-flight message should actually be accepted or not?
Well, we have exactly that. Enter: the DNS Blacklist.
Continue readingSome of you may know this. Some of you may not. But here’s something interesting: nowadays, cameras are everywhere, as in, just about everyone has one in their pocket. Sure, digital cameras are just counting photons hitting some silicon. But, before that? We had film. Film that recorded photos physically with chemical changes. And, I personally find that the science behind that is rather fascinating.
Continue readingSo I take it some people reading this are familiar with what I’ll call a ‘remote filesystem protocol’ like NFS, SMB, or AFP. Well, did you know there’s one that’s found use in a few places and you’ve maybe heard of once or twice, and really… well, doesn’t sound like it should make any sense? Welcome to WebDAV. The remote filesystem that runs over HTTP.
Continue readingSo here’s the thing. Compared to my other camera, the Nikon D7000, what I just bought is a 100% complete downgrade. However, I cannot resist the possibility of experiencing an era that had more or less ended before I was born. So, what did I do? I bought a 39 year old Nikon FG, which takes… 35mm film. But I won’t be stopping at just taking pictures… you’ll see shortly ;)
Continue readingThis is where I’d usually make some joke about “if you remember, back in the day…” but… given how Freenode and Libera have been in the news recently for Freenode’s rather hostile takeover (and suicide), You probably know what IRC is. So. IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is a really old (as in, 1988) protocol for text-based communications between users on a network. And the cool part is, it’s so simple that it’s almost funny. Like, let’s take a look. You could actually, with only a few minutes of reading, just enter raw IRC protocol lines by hand and have a perfectly valid and functional session.
Continue readingDo you like secure chat apps? but actually secure, not like Telegram? And end-to-end encrypted, if selected? And ones that support sending media, and files, and even voice and video calls? And completely decentralized meaning you don’t need to rely on any one company or any one third-party server?
Well do I have a deal for you: Matrix.
Continue readingAnyone notice that the featured images on post headers seemed to be a bit… well, bad? So did I, and I only just realized why that actually happens. And ironically, it was in the name of improvements. Luckily, with a little help from an upscaling AI, that’s not as bad of a problem, for now.
Continue readingBy default, the Markdown renderer in Hugo, at this point in time, is Goldmark, a CommonMark compliant renderer.
CommonMark makes no provisions for manually specifying the width or height of an image.
There’s various extensions, like those for Pandoc, Kramdown, and GFM, but Goldmark doesn’t support those.
Google is getting a little cranky with the amount of CLS on some pages, especially on mobile, so it’s a good idea for me to start specifying sizes for most images.
How should I do this? By hacking it on as a feature that is in no way the intended use for anything involved.
