One chicken-and-egg-problem with setting up servers is taking care of secrets. Secrets are hard, and they’re especially hard to keep secret. When working with systems management, you really want to keep your secrets secret, but you also want to share them with your peers. In essence, this is a conflict of interests and a hard problem to solve in a truly usable manner. But it’s not impossible. Lately, i’ve been re-introducing myself to Ansible because it’s a way to efficiently communicate intent between peers.

Any integration done well enough is sufficiently close to magic. With apologies to Isaac Asimov. In this article, i’m stunned by the ease of creating an ebook from a web page to an iPad with precisely two commands.

I’ve been interested in home automation for ten or fifteen years now, probably since writing my thesis on home networks access control, quite some time away. My view of a well made home automation is a home that responds to its inhabitants, in some cases even anticipates their wills and wants. Well, anticipate may be a bit of a stretch, but even “infers from” is already sufficiently close to magic.

I would like to explore the idea of Humane security as an alternative to Mandated security. None of these terms exist, or, at least, are established terms from before, so allow me to explain what i mean. In traditional computer security, corporate security, public sector security, and basically any high security environment, there’s a power structure where the user is told what to do and what not to do and that’s the end of it.

Any integration done well enough is sufficiently close to magic. With apologies to Isaac Asimov. In this article, i’m stunned by the ease of creating an ebook from a web page to an iPad with precisely two commands.

One chicken-and-egg-problem with setting up servers is taking care of secrets. Secrets are hard, and they’re especially hard to keep secret. When working with systems management, you really want to keep your secrets secret, but you also want to share them with your peers. In essence, this is a conflict of interests and a hard problem to solve in a truly usable manner. But it’s not impossible. Lately, i’ve been re-introducing myself to Ansible because it’s a way to efficiently communicate intent between peers.

Lo and behold. The cat in Schrödinger’s speaker box is alive! Or in more concrete terms, i will be speaking at Macaduk this year after all! Yes, the Macaduk organisers had dropped my request, but then, another already confirmed speaker had to cancel, so i’m on the stage again. And with a little less time that i’m entirely comfortable with. Like last time, i’m going to talk about security, but this time from a more humane perspective.

Today i learned (the hard way) that doing something by hand that you usually get through automation can be really tedious. So when you Automate Everything, make sure there’s an easy manual override when needed. But that’s for another post. I’ve given my second ever presentation, which was at the Finnish Mac Admins' meet-up. The presentation was essentially the same as i did in London earlier this year, about “Government Level Security (while maintaining your sanity and humanity)”, but in Finnish.

Caps lock? Show me a programmer or a system administrator that actually uses caps lock for producing CAPITAL LETTERS. Actually, don’t. But the point is, CAPS LOCK as a toggle for typing in SCREAM CASE versus normal case is really an outdated concept. That’s why i mapped my Caps Lock key to be a control key instead.

Any integration done well enough is sufficiently close to magic. With apologies to Isaac Asimov. In this article, i’m stunned by the ease of creating an ebook from a web page to an iPad with precisely two commands.

Any integration done well enough is sufficiently close to magic. With apologies to Isaac Asimov. In this article, i’m stunned by the ease of creating an ebook from a web page to an iPad with precisely two commands.

I listened to a swell podcast episode from freeCodeCamp where Shawn swyx Wang told an insane amount of great things. I really urge you to listen to the episode even if it’s two hours long (there’s at least four hours of content within those two hours!) to hear about practical work discipline (“No Zero-days”), of which i have way too little, and the concept of “Lerning in public”. Among several other things (like salary negotiation, react.

Aaaagh! I’m going to speak at a conference! And i haven’t even started writing my talk yet! And i thought i’d start writing it in January and it’s practically already February! Panic now! On a more serious note, i am indeed going to take a huge step over my insecurity and talk about something that i do know a bit about, though the more i think about it, the less i feel i really know, so it’s imposters' all around agian.

Today i’ve experienced several things, many of them new. Some new in a meaningful way, some mainly trivial. And in a broader scope of things, mostly trivial really.

It happened again. I let this site’s certificate expire. I’d blame my faulty calendar entry, but it’s really just a case of my procrastination. As i was getting ready to read my article on how to renew the Letsencrypt certificate the hard way, again, i saw that Gitlab Pages had something new to surprise me with. Automatic Letsencrypt Certificate Management. By the beard of Odin. Here are the steps to enable that

I got a nice and polite notice a month ago that my certificate on my blog is expiring. Thankfully i have documented the process on my blog, i thought. Sadly, i can’t remember on which of my computers i created the certificate. Also, i need that computer to renew the cert, and in the end, none of the computers i tend to use actually seemed to be able to renew the cert. So it looks like i’m having to renew the cert the Hard Way. From scratch.

Just recently, Hugo, the web site generator i use for this site, got a new feature: Composite theming. This means that you can build themes on other themes, or even do weird things like multi theme sites. I decided to try theme compositing just to change the fonts of my site.

Setting up https on a hugo site on Gitlab pages with your custom domain requires some manual work, but if i can do it, so can you.

TL;DR: To preserve html styling in summaries on hugo, use the tag <!--amore--> (removing the letter a) in your text.

Well would look at that – it’s a blog post!

I haven’t really toyed around with this thing for a while, but i somehow got the inspiration now, so why stop a good inspiration when you have it?

So what is this thing?

I can’t believe i haven’t written about my largest project in ages! Yes, i’ve taken the stage in an amateur children’s theatre production, Pippi Långstrump, which is Swedish for Pippi Longstocking. I’m playing Pippi’s dad Efraim and a small role as Starke Adolf who i don’t know the English name for. But it’s this strongman who performs at the market (originally, at the circus) and gets wrestled down by the strongest girl in the world.

Aaaaaagh! Looking at the MacADUK 2019 speaker list, i’m now completely overwhelmed by imposter syndrome. All these geniuses … and me?! Halp!

Vi har just en onsdagsövning med folk som vimsar fram och tillbaka och så har en ny grej kommit med i form av en väska (ni får se sen). Frågan är vad som ska hända med väskan för att det ska verka både naturligt och kul, samtidigt. Strålande idéer sprudlade i fors och kors ur skådespelarna tills Regissören morrade till att “Nu är här för många idéer." Så äntrade han scenen med säkra steg, regisserade skådespelarna till sina platser, gick scenen fram och tillbaka sekund för sekund, placerade väskan och koreograferade den som bär den och mitt i allt var det alldeles som det skulle vara.

In February 2016, Bangladesh was robbed of US$101 million by cunning cyber criminals using fraudulent SWIFT transfer requests. The money was siphoned from the Bangladesh National Bank’s account at the US Federal Reserve to banks in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Another US$850M was stopped from being transferred due to a happenstance. Check The Lazarus Heist for juicy details. What made the heist possible? Timing. Careful, thought-out execution. Ruthlessness. The bank robbery took place during a weekend of Lunar New Year festivities in South Asia, so there wasn’t really anyone on call to check and stop the transfers.

I bought a set of Yubikeys to figure out what the fuss was all about. Getting started was surprisingly painless and i now have a new authentication factor for Google, Github and Lastpass.

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A month back, i wrote a post “Help, it’s summer”, discussing (or rather, lamenting) how hard it can be to wind down and how i should “work” at allowing myself not to do anything work related – if i could only think of what that would be.

Well, all in all, i think i’ve done a pretty good job.

You’d think that creating a live video stream these days would be uncomplicated, a “solved problem”. Sure, things might be complicated by the fact that the production has multiple remote controlled cameras, slides/video with possible embedded audio, two audience screens (thankfully showing the same content, and no speaker screen), live dubbing, a separate stage on another floor to show the dubbed version of the presentation, streaming to YouTube in 1080/50p and record the thing on local storage, oh, and keep an eye on the Slack channel for questions and feedback from those on the other side of the stream.

Vi har lagts på coronapaus och livet är lite tommare. Inga träningar på ett okänt antal veckor. Och ingen aning om vi kan ha premiär i början av nästa år. Det vet bara coronan, och coronan gör så gott den kan för att slänga käppar i hjulet. På vår sista övning spelade vi in hela skådespelet så vi har nåt material att öva från. Så mycket blev i alla fall klart att det inte är så lätt att filma skådespel … och att vi inte riktigt är premiärklara.

Vi har just en onsdagsövning med folk som vimsar fram och tillbaka och så har en ny grej kommit med i form av en väska (ni får se sen). Frågan är vad som ska hända med väskan för att det ska verka både naturligt och kul, samtidigt. Strålande idéer sprudlade i fors och kors ur skådespelarna tills Regissören morrade till att “Nu är här för många idéer." Så äntrade han scenen med säkra steg, regisserade skådespelarna till sina platser, gick scenen fram och tillbaka sekund för sekund, placerade väskan och koreograferade den som bär den och mitt i allt var det alldeles som det skulle vara.