Update: July 2019
While we’re a couple of days into August already, a July status update is better late than never! Most of my July has been spent getting myself organized at my day job and assessing my workload after my coworker, whom previously shared my workload, left the company, leaving me as the sole Systems Engineer/IT “Help Desk”/Web Developer at my company. I wear a lot of hats, but so far the workload has been quite manageable.
Update: May 2019
It’s been a year and a half since starting this version of the blog. Behind the scenes, it’s been through a lot. Originally hosted on a Vultr VPS, this blog had been passed around to Linode, it had a long stay on a prgmr.com instance, and currently resides on a Linode instance again. As I host more and more things for myself and others, I’ve found I need to take more care into how much load another website might add, etc.
There Once Was a Sysadmin...
That sysadmin really enjoyed working on silly programs in his free time, he even runs a few websites! Oftentimes, this sysadmin is fairly surprised he has a real job as a Systems Engineer/Web Developer.
This is one of those times.
I recently decided to switch my domains’ name servers from CloudFlare to FastMail. There were a few reasons for this, all of which turned out to be the wrong answers to the original questions.
Security Self-Defense, presented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
For a while now, I’ve been aware of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), and I make good use of a fair number of their projects. The following is not an exhaustive list:
I also follow a fair share of recommendations from Privacy Tools including using uMatrix and CookieAutoDelete.
Now I recently came across another of their projects that I will most likely end up pointing people from now on. That project is Security Self-Defense, and they have a plethora of how-to guides explaining how to protect personal data and delete personal data. There’s also a ton of information on steps you can take to protect against hackers. One of my favorite articles outlines precautions to keep in mind at U.S. border crossings.
Base64 Encoding in Python 3
Recently I’ve been working on a backup script to back up a folder to a Backblaze B2 bucket. If only I had known I was about to spend an hour working on four silly lines of python code…
Backblaze’s documentation has absolutely no mention that this only works with Python 2. I’m not the only one1. Pronoy had this exact issue with a Google API. Again, no mention it only works in Python 2. In fact, the moment I stumbled across Pronoy’s post is the same moment I stopped ripping my hair out.