SMTP, or, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is the communications protocol that email servers (Mail Transfer Agents, or MTAs) use to talk to one another to… transfer mail. And SMTP has one glaring issue: A rather ambiguous “try again later”.
Continue readingAbstract: You suck, and do not know not to manage many of the security aspects of email.
Continue readingYou all know how footnotes work here, right? A little superscript number at the end of a sentence, and a list of numbers at the very bottom of the article, usually little remarks or extra details that are useful but not worth interrupting the flow of the article as a whole (or references). There’s just one problem: the notes aren’t anywhere near their associated text, meaning if you do want to read them, you might need to do some bouncing back-and-forth to understand everything. Well, no more!
Continue readingSo here’s a fun one.
Have you ever noticed that even for huge changes to a repository, a git push only sends over a few kilobytes, maybe a few megabytes at most?
If you’re familiar with the internals of git, you know that git stores an entire copy of the new file on commit.
So how are these changes so small?
Yeah I figure why not, at the same time that I’m replacing another key piece of network infrastructure, I might as well just replace the (second) most important piece, right? So cue the music, because…
Now, this is a story, all about how my life network got flipped, turned upside down, and I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air the owner of a… just… just cut the music. Let’s begin.
I was really fighting with my inner self to have a straightforward title for this one, but alas, resistance is futile.
BorgBackup, or, for short, just “Borg”, is a relatively fast (more on that later), efficient, secure, and authenticated way of backing up multiple devices either on a single network, or even across networks (you’ll see, again, later). This is currently what I use for backing up my stuff, and, well, it’s just cool, and definitely something you should take a look at.
Continue readingWhen is a file more than just a file?
When it’s actually a folder that Finder is lying to you about.
Every program, every kernel extension, and everything Time Machine creates on a network share is.. a bundle.
Even the Photos Library file in ~/Photos… well you get the point.
Let’s unpack these things, shall we?
Note: Not sponsored. Just excited.
So, fun fact, I run Pi-hole on my network as a relatively easy set-and-forget ad-block. For a while, this has been, and please stow your pitchforks, a VM on the main hypervisor. As of now… it’s that thing up there. Pi-hole’s resource requirements are so low that no matter what I assign that VM, I’m wasting something somewhere. Besides, I have plenty of those little machines, so why not?
Continue readingFor those unaware, Time Machine is the built-in backup application within macOS that will take incremental backups of your system to an Apple Time Capsule, or another local disk. Simple premise, almost as simple in execution. Let’s take it apart, shall we?
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