2022-Jul-18

TIL: Chrome Certificate errors can be useful

Today i learned, quite by accident, that the Chrome certificate error page can be quite useful! If you get an NET::ERR_CERT_something-or-the-other error message, you can click that NET::ERR_CERT... code. Your cursor won’t change, indicating that the text is clickable, but it will display the problematic certificate or cert chain in PEM format. You can then copy the certificate. On your terminal, invoke the spell pbpaste | openssl x509 -noout -text (replacing pbpaste with whatever command on Linux or Windows to paste the contents of the clipboard if so needed)

2022-Apr-22

End Of Disqussion

I got a message from Graham Pugh from the Mac Admins' Slack that my blog was lagging. This was a bit surprising because it is served from Gitlab Pages, which should have all the resources in the world. So i looked under the hood. And i was surprised.

2022-Apr-22

Almost Famous

The fame! The fortune! The almost! It’s more than my little brain can handle!

2022-Apr-13

Presenting with an iPad

I tried something new today. I held a presentation with the slides coming from an iPad. Specifically, the slides were on Keynote and were beamed wirelessly using AppleTV. And it was neat. I have an iPad Pro gen 4 (so the one that came out just before the first M1 model) which has caused me much joy. Today it also proved to be useful. It’s possible to connect the iPad to a second display using HDMI (through a USB-C to HDMI dongle) or by AppleTV, but this second screen will mirror the first one; you can’t have two separate screens on one iPad.

2022-Mar-29

Macaduk 2022: Security for Humans

Woo-hoo! I have just stepped off the stage at the Mac Admins' Conference 2022 in Brighton, UK, and i have survived! My presentation on Security for humans went without much catastrophy and nearly within the allotted time. I received rather enthusiastic applause and several people actually came up to me and told me the the presentation was good! Even more importantly, many people have talked with me that it indeed seems important to involve humans in the security loop.

2022-Mar-18

Ansible with dedicated SSH Keys

If you use Ansible to manage servers, you should probably use ssh keys to do so. Ssh keys are a way of authenticating to a server, like passwords are. Ssh keys can be protected with passwords or they can be passwordless. If you’re using them for automation, you might need to use passwordless ssh keys, but otherwise, it’s a good practice to protect the keys as well. You can create a key, or really a ssh key pair with the command

Learning in public

Curing my incompetence, one step at the time, in front of an audience.