Category: #Interwebs

Going secure with Bitnami, Apache2, and WordPress (Linux)

It’s very confusing! In fact I’d describe the current state of documentation and articles around this as a right clusterfuck.

Lies, it’s all lies. The articles out there make it out to be hyper-complex – it ain’t, it’s VERY simple, but there are zero articles which point out this path – the articles (which shall not be named), all point in the direction of the LEGO stack (Let’s Encrypt), which whilst free is a pain in the arse to understand without even trying to comprehend actually doing it.

Go spend £10ish a year on an SSL cert with one of the cheaper SSL certificate providers, you’ll thank yourself, and it’ll be simple!

Why go SSL, especially for a simple site? Not everyone is a tech expert – if they see a warning in their browser that your site isn’t secure, they’ll more than likely go navigate away. If you have any user interaction on the site, it is a security hole – especially when logging in – nobody wants to transmit passwords in plain text!

There is a break here, as this is a long article – not everyone will want to scroll through this thing 🙂

Continue reading Going secure with Bitnami, Apache2, and WordPress (Linux)

@Spabbit Blog on the #BRExit result

imageI was scrolling through the blog, and came across the below article from 2016… I think that now, here years later, it has even more meaning. Blip in the timeline, or chaos on a stick with ketchup? We’ll be finding out soon – watch this country shaped space 😉

Today, the UK has voted to leave the EU, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron (A public-schoolboy upper society product who’s never lived in real-life) has resigned.

There is a lot of chatter about this – a lot of it is bollocks and made up stats – we in the UK need to wait for the dust to settle before jumping to any conclusions.

Here is some proportion / perspective – The EU has only existed since 1956, we’ve only been in it since 1975… The U.K. began in 1284, was formalised in 1536 between England and Wales, with Scotland joining in 1707, and Northern Ireland in 1921.

You really think it’s all down hill from here? History points the other way, and you can’t ignore hundreds of years of historical trends for less than half a century – is this merely a blip in the larger time line?

bre

I’ve cracked my Facebook addiction.

Around a couple of weeks ago, I had a moment – the moment was a realisation that I was hooked on something, and just like any addict, I just couldn’t leave it alone. Now I’m not your typical person in regard to addiction – I can stop and start both alcohol and nicotine on a dime, as the Americans would say. Yup, very true – friends, colleagues and family all call me various names for my ability to go cold turkey and not turn into a raging monster (Then there’s the other side where I start up with no ill effects!).

Anyhow, despite my lack of traditional addiction, in the moment, I realised that Facebook was an unwelcome intruder in my mind, every five minutes whilst watching TV I’d be on the endless scroll quest to get yet more crap. I’m particular in the crap which flows in – for example, I don’t watch adverts on TV, and try to limit my news intake. Yet despite everything there was Facebook – even saying “Facebook” sounds like some kind of dirty word now.

I understand that some aspect, in a vague nebulous way, some long-ago nascent thought said “It’s a great way to keep up with Friends and Family”. It lied. You know the best way to keep with Friends and Family. See them. Call them. Be with them. Try it, you’ll appreciate the fresh yet old-fashioned way of doing things. Be in the moment. There is no spoon!

At first the revulsion was so bad, I turned off my devices and left them in another room. If I was going to go cold-turkey, I was going to do it full-bore. I managed to make that last most of a weekend, and then I had to re-join the connected-world (I work in I.T. and it’s kinda expected that you’re online 24*7). Even now, getting connected to the News and the world still gives me a mental twitch which I can’t shrug off. I’m conversant with the sardonic nature of recording these thoughts and posting them online – it’s like a great big dirty burger of filth, demolished with gusto, coming back with that sick sinking feeling of “What have I done!?”.

Can I escape Facebook completely? No. The insidious Facebook has managed to weave itself into minds and hearts like some kind of meme-virus. The insidious Facebook had managed to integrate into modern society, it’s truly the electronic equivalent of a symbiote. Instead of a community notice board for my area, there is a Facebook Group. Instead of a buy and sell board, there is a Facebook Buy & Sell Group. Instead of phoning up the local authority, they’re on Facebook, posting official notifications for the masses to digest. You get the picture – Facebook has a Face-Tentacle in everything everywhere.

Where am I left now? In Face-Limbo.

Fuck.

I Find That Offensive!

iftoI was listening to the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2, the subject matter, centred around “the right to take offense” struck a chord with me. In the programme, the author Claire Fox described her experiences with young adults which inspired her to write the book, “I Find That Offensive“.

I agree 100% with everything she says in the book, and I fear for the future of the society which allows, and to a lesser extent encourages this behaviour among the young.

It’s a very interesting read, which I would strongly recommend to any thinking and reasoning adult – and if you have the opportunity to change the mind of a young person to be more open and less offended, then please enable that most vital skill set whenever, and wherever you can; survival of the race by decreasing future offended-wars is a noble quest. (I’m also of the opinion this ties in with a secular or atheist point of view, I strongly suspect the religious mind isn’t capable of this, not truly…)

There are a few memes drifting around the interwebs concerning the same subject – all along the same lines – and they’re true… “So fucking what?” as Stephen Fry says…
IMG_1451

This is where Blasphemy started, and we all know how fucking evil that shit is – people have been killing and torturing other people throughout the ages in the name of that fucker, and the worst thing, it still goes on today – however it now seems that the youth of today is intent on broadening this to other subjects as well… Claire Fox describes a talk regarding a footballer, convicted of rape, discussing whether or not he should resume his career, where any other points of view than further, and more extreme methods of punishment were shouted down, and effectively banned by the court of “I’m offended” – it’s a sad state of affairs when our young adults are so mentally closeted they can’t even hear the opinion of others.

IMG_1452It’s my personal opinion that they’ve simply had it too easy, they don’t know what real life is actually like, they’ve never struggled for crusts of bread, they’ve never been broken, never hit rock bottom and then fallen some more – IF you’ve been unfortunate (Or should I say fortunate?) enough to have been that broken, you know, you just fucking know that life isn’t that simple. The act of being broken – it makes you – when coming out the other side, you have a fresh appreciation of what actually matters, and you know, just being fucking offended simply doesn’t live in the same universe as real life.

Here are a couple of quotes of mine, and I sincerely hope they offend someone somewhere…

“Offended? – Good. Makes you feel alive. Everyone has the right to be offended, cause offence and be told to fuck off, quite equally. Anyone who thinks anything else is clearly fucking insane.”

“Anyone who is offended merely by words not the context / intent of the words is truly stupid.
Stupidity is the only universal crime.
Darwin for the win.”

My vote goes to Labour in 2017 – this is why. #votelabour2017 #corbyn #labour

Whilst I’ve not always backed Jeremy Corbyn, I’ve come to respect his views and see through the media campaign to smear his character. Many of the published claims about Jeremy have been proven false, and are very distorted from actual reality – for example he has never explicitly stated that he will not defend the country, or that he supports the IRA; in fact, just the opposite. Just because he wants to understand the other side of the equation, doesn’t imply consent or support for that side.

He has integrity, more so than is demonstrated by the majority of his competitors, or by most people. His views also aren’t distorted by the blight on Humanity – religion, yes it’s widely known he is atheist; electing a leader who doesn’t talk to invisible friends is a good thing.

Anyhow, enough of the man, and more about the policies of the party:

Nationalisation: The UK has been totally ripped off by the sell off of public assets and services to the private sector, which to add insult to injury, is often compounded by the fact that said services, now in private hands and delivering profits to private shareholders, are subsidised by the tax payer… let me get this straight – a for profit private company buys services / assets from the government / the tax payer, the services often go downhill, and then we pay yet more for a worse service? Time to draw a line, and bring them back to public ownership – That is what Labour will do if brought back in. #votelabour2017

Defence: Labour will keep Trident, and will take the appropriate precautions to ensure defence of the realm. They’re not however tying to break life as we know it, such as the Conservatives trying to break Internet encryption, and turn our Internet access into that of China!

Tax: Fair tax policies, including a pledge to bring VAT down again – something which never should have gone up!

Education: Do away with tuition fees – Education for the masses, tax payer funded, is a must – otherwise how else are we going to make the most of our young people? Saddling them with what almost amounts to mortgage payments off the bat just isn’t right!

Costed budget: The Labour budget has been fully costed, and made public. Conservative budget – just a vague policy somewhere in the grey.

Immigration: A sensible policy of controlled immigration – not a set of wildly out of whack figures which simply aren’t achievable or economically viable.

Police: Unlike the person leading the Conservative Party, who has somehow been forgiven for the gross errors which have seen 20,000 police and 35,000 military cuts; Labour will immediately try to correct the monumental error by immediately bringing back 10,000 police officers. Who can say if one of the 20,000 police cut by May wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time to stop at least one of the recent terrorist attacks?

Not insulting: Not once has Jeremy or the Labour Party come up with ‘Magic Money Tree’ or other such unfounded insults to their competition – just the opposite, they’ve simply stuck by their fully costed and publicly available budget & manifesto.

Adding a batch script to the Windows Context Menu

With my previous article on How to remove the metadata title from MKV files I discussed methods for using a simple batch file to process a folder, removing metadata from individual files, plus an option to do this recursively; this got me thinking how great it would be to add that to the right-click menu for Windows folders.

As it turns out, it’s really easy, and using the example of recursively processing all MKV files in a folder structure, this is how…

Save the following to a file called MKVCleanup.bat, place this in your Windows folder (Usually c:\windows). You can download a copy by right-clicking here, and selecting “Save As”.

@echo off
cd %1
for /r %%i in (*.mkv) do (
echo processing "%%i"
"C:\Program Files\MKVToolNix\mkvpropedit.exe" "%%i" -d title
)
Echo Done.
pause

The next step, actually adding the right-click command is a registry addition; save the following text into a file on your desktop called MKVCleanup.reg, then right-click on it, selecting “Merge”. You can download a copy by right-clicking here, and selecting “Save As”, you’ll still need to right click on it, selecting merge. This makes an entry in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell – it just includes a title, and one command which points to the batch file.

It takes advantage that the environment automatically starts in parent of the folder indicated by your right click, and passes the target folder as a command line parameter.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\MKVCleanup]
@="&MKVCleanup"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\MKVCleanup\command]
@="\"C:\\Windows\\MKVCleanup.bat\" \"%1\""

If you’re actually using this, you’ll also need the MKVToolNix Program (Backup link to 64 bit installer, since their site seems to be down a lot). Go download and install. It’s free, and doesn’t nag.

That’s it, no reboot required, as soon as you’re done, you’ll have a new & shiny right click option in Windows Explorer for folders called “MKVCleanup” – simples 🙂