It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

Adding a second layer of authentication to your account is essential for your security, but like having a lock on your door, it can lock you out when things go wrong. You really need to think of the spare keys before that happens.

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.

One day i’m going to die, which is something i might as well come to terms with. It’s not like i’m in any kind of hurry to die; i rather like living and i’d prefer to postpone the inevitable end as much as is easily possible. But after i’m dead, i’ll leave a big digital heap of memories behind me, and that’s what this post is about: making those memories accessible to my near and dear, if that’s what they want.

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.

The first time you contact an ssh server, you’re presented with a fingerprint and asked whether you want to trust the server to be who it is, based on this fingerprint. Blindly, i might add. If you’re at least a bit concerned about (usable) security, this should send a few shivers down your spine; how the heck are you supposed to know whether this fingerprint is right or not. If you’re managing your servers with ansible, this query can be inconvenient, as it stops your flow at some random place and it’s not entirely clear where it will commence.

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.

One really nice thing from the MacSysadmin conference (see the next/previous article), i got to hear that i have at least one reader of my blog! Yay! Thank you! I wish i had a little hand-wavy-thing on this blog, like the one on Medium, so people could react and say “Yay!” or “I read this”, or even “Thanks!”, if they were so inclined. I’d like it to be privacy conscious though.

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.

Last week, i was involved with Reaktor Breakpoint, a tech, design, business and future conference with about 600 attendees and twenty-odd speakers.

Unlike with last Breakpoint in 2015, i wasn’t involved in the planning bits, i just worked with the execution. On the surface, my job sounds trivial. I was to make sure all presenters' slides were delivered to the right stages, in time, before each presenter’s show, and looking awesome.

I like to emphasize the last word of the previous paragraph, because that is your job and the job of nearly everyone working backstage or in production: making the presenter look, sound, and feel awesome.

While delivering slides may sound like the job of a glorified runner, it was actually quite a bit of logistics than i’d originally expected.

Your network will always grow, and due to the laws of entropy, left to itself, it’ll grow messier. Here are some things to consider while it’s still small and manageable:

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.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

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.

I’m not very good at throwing old stuff away. On the Internet, storage space is nearly infinite (in comparison to my brain). So i rather archive than delete. I’m like a squirrel in that way. Thus, i decided that i wanted to keep my old Now posts, to turn the Now section into something akin to a blog. How easy i though it was. This site is built on Hugo, a static web site generator.

I am not a coder, but i do dabble with Python from time to time. I know enough Python to be dangerous but not enough to be clever. I know there are Pythonic ways of doing things, but i’m not just there yet. But since the tagline of this blog is Learning in public, i might as well do so, with the hope that somebody will tell me how to do this properly.

One really nice thing from the MacSysadmin conference (see the next/previous article), i got to hear that i have at least one reader of my blog! Yay! Thank you! I wish i had a little hand-wavy-thing on this blog, like the one on Medium, so people could react and say “Yay!” or “I read this”, or even “Thanks!”, if they were so inclined. I’d like it to be privacy conscious though.

I’ve spent this wonderful week at the MacSysAdmin conference, which, as you may be able to deduce from its name, is a conference for Mac sysadmins. Being at a conference, and at this conference in particular, can be inspiring, which is why i’ve decided to create a follow-up talk for my first one (or last one, however you want to put it), on the topic of Humane Security. Now while i’d love to give it at MacSysadmin, which i consider the crown jewel of all Mac sysadmin conferences1, i really feel i should first approach Macaduk with my proposal.

Last week, i was involved with Reaktor Breakpoint, a tech, design, business and future conference with about 600 attendees and twenty-odd speakers.

Unlike with last Breakpoint in 2015, i wasn’t involved in the planning bits, i just worked with the execution. On the surface, my job sounds trivial. I was to make sure all presenters' slides were delivered to the right stages, in time, before each presenter’s show, and looking awesome.

I like to emphasize the last word of the previous paragraph, because that is your job and the job of nearly everyone working backstage or in production: making the presenter look, sound, and feel awesome.

While delivering slides may sound like the job of a glorified runner, it was actually quite a bit of logistics than i’d originally expected.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

I’m kind of fond of the HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 series switches. They are mostly no-nonsense and fairly nice to configure from the command line.

The Macaduk conference has been moved to May, in hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic has passed (into) Stage 3 by then. I’m still planning on giving my Security for humans talk, but in two months, not two weeks. The upshot is that i’ve been given a second chance to actually make this a good talk :) There’s a discussion group on the Macaduk Whova (it’s an app for events) for my session and if you feel like pitching in with your questions and ideas, please join!

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.

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.

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.

There’s a new currency in town and it’s called Q. Or more exactly, it’s an initiative in the making, by some ex-PayPal guys, to create a an alternative currency which they call Q. They’re kickstarting it by taking registrations from people. If you want in, you know me and i know you …

here’s my invite link: https://initiativeq.com/invite/PQWHnZBFX.

The Q initiative is handing out a bunch of free Q currency and the quicker you react, the more Q you and i get for you signing up and me accepting you. Let me know after you registered, because I need to verify you on my end.

To keep up with the spirit of Q, please only follow the invite link if we know each other. The link will stop working once i’m out of invites.

For me, Docker’s been this black box that people say is the best thing ever and is so easy to get into and just package everything with Docker and things’ll just work. Yeah. Right. I don’t trust that at all.

So i’ve decided to learn something new. I’ve decided to demystify Docker.

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.

Varje ny början kommer från slutet av en tidigare början. Ungefär så sa Seneca1, eller Dan Wilson från orkestern Semisonic. Och precis så kändes det när jag sent om sider kom i säng igår efter Nyländsk Afton, Nylands teatermotsvarighet till Oscargalan. Det var där Kapten Efraim Långstrump fick uppträda för sista gången, och Sheriffen av Nottingham den första. På onsdag kväll träffades Pippi-gänget för en första och enda träning inför NSU-galan.

Your network will always grow, and due to the laws of entropy, left to itself, it’ll grow messier. Here are some things to consider while it’s still small and manageable:

Idag är jag statist i filmningen av en finsk deckare. Sorjonen och muralmorden, eller det som heter Bordertown på Netflix. Kameran går och det är lite pirrigt. Det andra gången jag medverkar, på ett mycket litet plan, i film. Första gången var jag “reporter” i Den svavelgula himlen och eftersom jag hade en (1) replik, var jag skådespelare – filmskådespelare! – och idag är jag statist, på hemligstemplad ort och gör som regissören säjer.

Varje ny början kommer från slutet av en tidigare början. Ungefär så sa Seneca1, eller Dan Wilson från orkestern Semisonic. Och precis så kändes det när jag sent om sider kom i säng igår efter Nyländsk Afton, Nylands teatermotsvarighet till Oscargalan. Det var där Kapten Efraim Långstrump fick uppträda för sista gången, och Sheriffen av Nottingham den första. På onsdag kväll träffades Pippi-gänget för en första och enda träning inför NSU-galan.

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.

Thers’s this thing in the Apple admins community called The Apple Way. It’s a half-humourous, half-cynical and just half-given-up way of saying that on an Apple device, you can do things the way Apple intended, or you can do it the hard way (but regretting you did). I publish my blog the hard way. My blog is built using a static website generator 1. Under the hood, it’s a bunch of markdown files, configuration files, styles and stuff, which the generator converts into a website.

For some strange reason, i realized that there’s a spot in my old MSc Thesis which says it’s available on line. So i thought i’d follow up on that promise and make sure it is. And while i was at it, i wrote a whole page about how to (not) write your thesis. So there. Now for some truly unfathomable reason, the link to the thesis page doesn’t show if you’re reading the preview of this.

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.

Thers’s this thing in the Apple admins community called The Apple Way. It’s a half-humourous, half-cynical and just half-given-up way of saying that on an Apple device, you can do things the way Apple intended, or you can do it the hard way (but regretting you did). I publish my blog the hard way. My blog is built using a static website generator 1. Under the hood, it’s a bunch of markdown files, configuration files, styles and stuff, which the generator converts into a website.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The first time you contact an ssh server, you’re presented with a fingerprint and asked whether you want to trust the server to be who it is, based on this fingerprint. Blindly, i might add. If you’re at least a bit concerned about (usable) security, this should send a few shivers down your spine; how the heck are you supposed to know whether this fingerprint is right or not. If you’re managing your servers with ansible, this query can be inconvenient, as it stops your flow at some random place and it’s not entirely clear where it will commence.

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.

UPDATE! HOLD YOUR HORSES! THIS MIGHT NOT WORK! STILL REQUIRES MORE INVESTIGATION! DO NOT USE! AT LEAST NOT IN PRODUCTION! I AM SO SORRY! IT WAS MY FAULT! Update on the update! I found the problem and i will post about that soon. The article below is part of the solution, but it will require another trick. Now please read on, at your own risk :) HP has a strange way of (not) distributing proper drivers for their printers.

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

I’m kind of fond of the HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 series switches. They are mostly no-nonsense and fairly nice to configure from the command line.

I’m not very good at throwing old stuff away. On the Internet, storage space is nearly infinite (in comparison to my brain). So i rather archive than delete. I’m like a squirrel in that way. Thus, i decided that i wanted to keep my old Now posts, to turn the Now section into something akin to a blog. How easy i though it was. This site is built on Hugo, a static web site generator.

Updated the theme for my blog and oh goodness, now i need to have an image for each post or you’ll get my solemn figure for each entry unless i can find something nicer. I’ve already patched my site’s theme so that i can give credit to any creator who isn’t me. Now i just need to think of a nifty way to include the license of the image too.

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

Inactivity can do wonders. Having been on summer vacation for a while and not having done anything technically creative, my mind decided it’s time to experiment a little. I have a few websites, or blogs, or whatever, and for reasons of simplicity and incompetence, these have always been separate from each other. Well, i thought, how about trying to consolidate them? Just for fun? So that’s what i did. My blogs/sites use Hugo, a static website generator.

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 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.

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.

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

I’ve been sick in a way that can only truly be appreciated by experiencing it. I’ve had manfluenza, which is the male version of any disease and is by definition worse just by the virtue of you being male. We’re not as good at handling pain. And yes, i’m joking. A bit.

I was about to write a long technical post about my illness, but i’ll just lay down the short and sweet.

Using an iPad with a hard keyboard is kinda nifty. There’s Cmd+Tab to switch between apps, Cmd+Space to search. Arrow keys, with the Cmd and Alt modifiers work as they should. And while i’ve been searching for a Back button on the iPad, you can go Home using the keyboard with the shortcut Cmd+H. Nifty. Coming from an Android world, a universal Back button is a central navigation device that i’m truly missing.

Thers’s this thing in the Apple admins community called The Apple Way. It’s a half-humourous, half-cynical and just half-given-up way of saying that on an Apple device, you can do things the way Apple intended, or you can do it the hard way (but regretting you did). I publish my blog the hard way. My blog is built using a static website generator 1. Under the hood, it’s a bunch of markdown files, configuration files, styles and stuff, which the generator converts into a website.

Two happy things coincided this week. Apple released a new iPad that you can use an actual keyboard with, and i had a meeting with my Apple SMEs. So i voiced an earlier thought i’d had, “can you get any actual work done with this?”. So the other one asked “Do you want to try?” Yes! Absolutely! Shure dang! (just as soon as i return the MacBook i borrowed from them :) 1

UPDATE! HOLD YOUR HORSES! THIS MIGHT NOT WORK! STILL REQUIRES MORE INVESTIGATION! DO NOT USE! AT LEAST NOT IN PRODUCTION! I AM SO SORRY! IT WAS MY FAULT! Update on the update! I found the problem and i will post about that soon. The article below is part of the solution, but it will require another trick. Now please read on, at your own risk :) HP has a strange way of (not) distributing proper drivers for their printers.

Using an iPad with a hard keyboard is kinda nifty. There’s Cmd+Tab to switch between apps, Cmd+Space to search. Arrow keys, with the Cmd and Alt modifiers work as they should. And while i’ve been searching for a Back button on the iPad, you can go Home using the keyboard with the shortcut Cmd+H. Nifty. Coming from an Android world, a universal Back button is a central navigation device that i’m truly missing.

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.

The first time you contact an ssh server, you’re presented with a fingerprint and asked whether you want to trust the server to be who it is, based on this fingerprint. Blindly, i might add. If you’re at least a bit concerned about (usable) security, this should send a few shivers down your spine; how the heck are you supposed to know whether this fingerprint is right or not. If you’re managing your servers with ansible, this query can be inconvenient, as it stops your flow at some random place and it’s not entirely clear where it will commence.

Jag vill här ge mitt djupaste hattlyft till regissörer som behöver handha oerfarna amatörskådespelare. Jag som entusiastisk nybörjare, full av spontana idéer (och lustigheter) jag inte kan hålla tyst med, en som ifrågasätter eller ställer frågor om saker som inte vi (dvs regisssören) ännu ens hunnit tänka på … kan ju inte vara lätt att handla med. Samma gäller koreografen. Jag är hopplöst långsam att lära mej steg, fullkomligt okoordinerad med mina två vänsterben, och har så himla lätt att ljudligt protestera att det här går ju aldrig!

{% instagram B2kP4CVBNVp %} Vi fick teaterkläderna härom dagen och de ser förfärligt snitsiga ut. Kläderna är från en affär i Sankt Karins som specialiserar sej på medeltida jox och attiraljer. Ännu har vi inte haft träning i kostym, men en del klädprovning har det varit redan. En sak som är uppenbar är att medeltida kläder inte är av riktigt lika mjukt material som moderna, och det gäller även medeltida kläder gjorda på detta årtusende.

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

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.

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 have a hobby i haven’t written much about here. I sing. I started to sing by a happy happenstance and a fortunate misunderstanding when i was the Nights Watch at the music camp my kids were at and i thought the commanding “Everyone must come to the singing auditions” really meant everyone and not just the campers. I was scared to bits, but after getting over the terror, i started really liking it!

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.

For me, Docker’s been this black box that people say is the best thing ever and is so easy to get into and just package everything with Docker and things’ll just work. Yeah. Right. I don’t trust that at all.

So i’ve decided to learn something new. I’ve decided to demystify Docker.

It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

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.

2020 2021 2022 I’ll be at Macaduk in May November 2020 March 2022, or whenever Macaduk will be held, talking about Security for Humans. I had, at some stage, thought about the subject The Human Sysadmin but maybe that’s a bit too big of a subject, best saved for when i have some more experience in flapping my lips in front of a paying audience. 2019 My first ever public talk, on security in an official setting, at Macaduk 2019.

The Macaduk conference has been moved to May, in hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic has passed (into) Stage 3 by then. I’m still planning on giving my Security for humans talk, but in two months, not two weeks. The upshot is that i’ve been given a second chance to actually make this a good talk :) There’s a discussion group on the Macaduk Whova (it’s an app for events) for my session and if you feel like pitching in with your questions and ideas, please join!

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.

Last autumn, i volunteered to speak at the MacAD.uk conference 2020. As i neither got an acceptance, nor a rejection letter, apart from a two word response, “great thanks”, i’m now assuming i won’t be talking there. Therefore, i haven’t prepared a talk. My nightmare scenario is that i’ll show up at the conference and they expect me to present. Update: That’s pretty much what happened! Except that they did give me four weeks of warning :)

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

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 learned that you can enter the recovery mode through the Boot Volume selector when starting up a Mac. Until today, i’ve booted the computer, hurried up to hold down ⌘ R for an unknown amount of time and hoped i got the timing right. Now, i boot with the Alt (Option) key down, wait for the boot volume selector and then press ⌘ R. Okay, so it’s another unnecessary step, but somehow i feel less stressed.

So you’re tired of the standard profile pictures, don’t want to use the camera, don’t have a Mac Server? Here’s a fairly simple workaround to use any picture as your profile picture.

I’ve been sick in a way that can only truly be appreciated by experiencing it. I’ve had manfluenza, which is the male version of any disease and is by definition worse just by the virtue of you being male. We’re not as good at handling pain. And yes, i’m joking. A bit.

I was about to write a long technical post about my illness, but i’ll just lay down the short and sweet.

For some strange reason, i realized that there’s a spot in my old MSc Thesis which says it’s available on line. So i thought i’d follow up on that promise and make sure it is. And while i was at it, i wrote a whole page about how to (not) write your thesis. So there. Now for some truly unfathomable reason, the link to the thesis page doesn’t show if you’re reading the preview of this.

UPDATE! HOLD YOUR HORSES! THIS MIGHT NOT WORK! STILL REQUIRES MORE INVESTIGATION! DO NOT USE! AT LEAST NOT IN PRODUCTION! I AM SO SORRY! IT WAS MY FAULT! Update on the update! I found the problem and i will post about that soon. The article below is part of the solution, but it will require another trick. Now please read on, at your own risk :) HP has a strange way of (not) distributing proper drivers for their printers.

{{ note msg=“This is a totally untechnical, unapologetically self-absorbed post.” }}

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.

I’ve been sick in a way that can only truly be appreciated by experiencing it. I’ve had manfluenza, which is the male version of any disease and is by definition worse just by the virtue of you being male. We’re not as good at handling pain. And yes, i’m joking. A bit.

I was about to write a long technical post about my illness, but i’ll just lay down the short and sweet.

Updated the theme for my blog and oh goodness, now i need to have an image for each post or you’ll get my solemn figure for each entry unless i can find something nicer. I’ve already patched my site’s theme so that i can give credit to any creator who isn’t me. Now i just need to think of a nifty way to include the license of the image too.

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.

It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

Adding a second layer of authentication to your account is essential for your security, but like having a lock on your door, it can lock you out when things go wrong. You really need to think of the spare keys before that happens.

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.

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.

There’s a new currency in town and it’s called Q. Or more exactly, it’s an initiative in the making, by some ex-PayPal guys, to create a an alternative currency which they call Q. They’re kickstarting it by taking registrations from people. If you want in, you know me and i know you …

here’s my invite link: https://initiativeq.com/invite/PQWHnZBFX.

The Q initiative is handing out a bunch of free Q currency and the quicker you react, the more Q you and i get for you signing up and me accepting you. Let me know after you registered, because I need to verify you on my end.

To keep up with the spirit of Q, please only follow the invite link if we know each other. The link will stop working once i’m out of invites.

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.

For some strange reason, i realized that there’s a spot in my old MSc Thesis which says it’s available on line. So i thought i’d follow up on that promise and make sure it is. And while i was at it, i wrote a whole page about how to (not) write your thesis. So there. Now for some truly unfathomable reason, the link to the thesis page doesn’t show if you’re reading the preview of this.

It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

I have a hobby i haven’t written much about here. I sing. I started to sing by a happy happenstance and a fortunate misunderstanding when i was the Nights Watch at the music camp my kids were at and i thought the commanding “Everyone must come to the singing auditions” really meant everyone and not just the campers. I was scared to bits, but after getting over the terror, i started really liking it!

The last ten or eleven days, i’ve been on a music camp with my kids. Well, mostly it’s been the kids doing the music and me looking out during the night. But i was in the “adult ensemble”, where we practiced these two songs, Alta Trinità beata and I skovens dybe stille ro. The first of these is an old Italian religious song, the other a Danish folk song. Since i’m not much of a singer and because i don’t read sheet music very well, i try to teach myself my stuff by transcribing the notes into a notation software (called MuseScore).

Your network will always grow, and due to the laws of entropy, left to itself, it’ll grow messier. Here are some things to consider while it’s still small and manageable:

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

I’m kind of fond of the HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 series switches. They are mostly no-nonsense and fairly nice to configure from the command line.

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.

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.

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.

So you’re tired of the standard profile pictures, don’t want to use the camera, don’t have a Mac Server? Here’s a fairly simple workaround to use any picture as your profile picture.

Updated the theme for my blog and oh goodness, now i need to have an image for each post or you’ll get my solemn figure for each entry unless i can find something nicer. I’ve already patched my site’s theme so that i can give credit to any creator who isn’t me. Now i just need to think of a nifty way to include the license of the image too.

Varje ny början kommer från slutet av en tidigare början. Ungefär så sa Seneca1, eller Dan Wilson från orkestern Semisonic. Och precis så kändes det när jag sent om sider kom i säng igår efter Nyländsk Afton, Nylands teatermotsvarighet till Oscargalan. Det var där Kapten Efraim Långstrump fick uppträda för sista gången, och Sheriffen av Nottingham den första. På onsdag kväll träffades Pippi-gänget för en första och enda träning inför NSU-galan.

Historierna går lite i sär när man försöker reda ut hur jag hamnade på audition till Finns Sommarteater, men där var jag i varje fall. Omgiven av barn och ungdomar. Vi kan inte ha varit mer än en handfull vuxna och flera hörde till produktionsteamet. En del av ungarna kände varandra från förr. Jag kände mej lite malplacerad, men beslöt att det skulle inte hinra mej. Här skulle det köras fullt ut.

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.

UPDATE! HOLD YOUR HORSES! THIS MIGHT NOT WORK! STILL REQUIRES MORE INVESTIGATION! DO NOT USE! AT LEAST NOT IN PRODUCTION! I AM SO SORRY! IT WAS MY FAULT! Update on the update! I found the problem and i will post about that soon. The article below is part of the solution, but it will require another trick. Now please read on, at your own risk :) HP has a strange way of (not) distributing proper drivers for their printers.

It is now twenty years to the day since the last show of my radio programme “Into the mist” (or “In i dimman”, in Swedish) aired. The show ran for two years on Yle X3M1, first weekly and then every two weeks, until it was pulled for being too far off the mainstream. It was the best job i’d had, and i still miss it fondly. Into the mist played Progressive rock.

It is now twenty years to the day since the last show of my radio programme “Into the mist” (or “In i dimman”, in Swedish) aired. The show ran for two years on Yle X3M1, first weekly and then every two weeks, until it was pulled for being too far off the mainstream. It was the best job i’d had, and i still miss it fondly. Into the mist played Progressive rock.

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.

2020 2021 2022 I’ll be at Macaduk in May November 2020 March 2022, or whenever Macaduk will be held, talking about Security for Humans. I had, at some stage, thought about the subject The Human Sysadmin but maybe that’s a bit too big of a subject, best saved for when i have some more experience in flapping my lips in front of a paying audience. 2019 My first ever public talk, on security in an official setting, at Macaduk 2019.

The Macaduk conference has been moved to May, in hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic has passed (into) Stage 3 by then. I’m still planning on giving my Security for humans talk, but in two months, not two weeks. The upshot is that i’ve been given a second chance to actually make this a good talk :) There’s a discussion group on the Macaduk Whova (it’s an app for events) for my session and if you feel like pitching in with your questions and ideas, please join!

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.

Last autumn, i volunteered to speak at the MacAD.uk conference 2020. As i neither got an acceptance, nor a rejection letter, apart from a two word response, “great thanks”, i’m now assuming i won’t be talking there. Therefore, i haven’t prepared a talk. My nightmare scenario is that i’ll show up at the conference and they expect me to present. Update: That’s pretty much what happened! Except that they did give me four weeks of warning :)

I’ve spent this wonderful week at the MacSysAdmin conference, which, as you may be able to deduce from its name, is a conference for Mac sysadmins. Being at a conference, and at this conference in particular, can be inspiring, which is why i’ve decided to create a follow-up talk for my first one (or last one, however you want to put it), on the topic of Humane Security. Now while i’d love to give it at MacSysadmin, which i consider the crown jewel of all Mac sysadmin conferences1, i really feel i should first approach Macaduk with my proposal.

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.

I am not a coder, but i do dabble with Python from time to time. I know enough Python to be dangerous but not enough to be clever. I know there are Pythonic ways of doing things, but i’m not just there yet. But since the tagline of this blog is Learning in public, i might as well do so, with the hope that somebody will tell me how to do this properly.

There’s a new currency in town and it’s called Q. Or more exactly, it’s an initiative in the making, by some ex-PayPal guys, to create a an alternative currency which they call Q. They’re kickstarting it by taking registrations from people. If you want in, you know me and i know you …

here’s my invite link: https://initiativeq.com/invite/PQWHnZBFX.

The Q initiative is handing out a bunch of free Q currency and the quicker you react, the more Q you and i get for you signing up and me accepting you. Let me know after you registered, because I need to verify you on my end.

To keep up with the spirit of Q, please only follow the invite link if we know each other. The link will stop working once i’m out of invites.

It is now twenty years to the day since the last show of my radio programme “Into the mist” (or “In i dimman”, in Swedish) aired. The show ran for two years on Yle X3M1, first weekly and then every two weeks, until it was pulled for being too far off the mainstream. It was the best job i’d had, and i still miss it fondly. Into the mist played Progressive rock.

I have a hobby i haven’t written much about here. I sing. I started to sing by a happy happenstance and a fortunate misunderstanding when i was the Nights Watch at the music camp my kids were at and i thought the commanding “Everyone must come to the singing auditions” really meant everyone and not just the campers. I was scared to bits, but after getting over the terror, i started really liking it!

Jag har egentligen en lite konstig roll i Stulen kärlek. Jag är med i första aktens första scen och sen droppar jag in och ut under andra akten några gånger. Det betyder alltså att jag ska köra 100% vid start men sen kommer jag aldrig riktigt igång eftersom det är nästan 50 minuter tills jag tittar in igen. Och det bara i tio sekunder. Så när resten av ensemblen är eld och lågor till pausen har jag knappt börjat.

Jag vill här ge mitt djupaste hattlyft till regissörer som behöver handha oerfarna amatörskådespelare. Jag som entusiastisk nybörjare, full av spontana idéer (och lustigheter) jag inte kan hålla tyst med, en som ifrågasätter eller ställer frågor om saker som inte vi (dvs regisssören) ännu ens hunnit tänka på … kan ju inte vara lätt att handla med. Samma gäller koreografen. Jag är hopplöst långsam att lära mej steg, fullkomligt okoordinerad med mina två vänsterben, och har så himla lätt att ljudligt protestera att det här går ju aldrig!

Det här med att spela skådespel är inte lätt för mej. Eller mer specifikt, jag har inte så svårt att improvisera eller pajasa mej då när det inte är press, men att lära sej saker utantill och sen upprepa dem under press … det är en utmaning. Åtminstone för mej. Därför är jag ganska tacksam att jag har en ändå rätt så liten roll och egentligen bara en koreografi. Sånger är det lite lättare med, och jag tror att det är en del av förklaringen.

Jag står mitt emellan två kapitel just nu. Eller mer specifikt, mitt emellan två skådespel. Det är ett veckoslut kvar av Robin Hood på Fallåker. Nästa lördag spelar vi dubbelfinal och sen lägger Nottingwood lapp på luckan. Det är samtidigt både skönt och lite dystert, men så ska det väl vara. Åtminstone vet jag att teatrandet inte tar slut bara för att teatern gör det. Saltkråkan-övningarna för nästa års Finns-produktion är ren i full gång.

Det är uppenbarligen få saker längre än ett premiärveckoslut. Egentligen började det i början av veckan med två genrep och konsert med Devin Townsend :). Men premiär var det på fredag och efter det premiärkalas! Lördag var ledig dag – vilket var oerhört skönt – och söndag var det andra föreställningen. Och faktiskt, så gick allt riktigt bra! Jo, några små missar här och där, men inget som skulle ha fällt föreställningen.

Så har vi tränat, repeterat och övat och i kväll är det Generalrepetition 1. Inför testpublik. Inte för att det finns så mycket vi kan ändra på om publiken är missnöjd, men det är kanske främst så att vi får testa att spela för en levande samling människor. Repliker, scenbyten och koreografier börjar kännas, om inte säkra, så åtminstone bekanta. Jag har tillochmed mejkat mej runt ögonen en gång och idag ska jag göra det igen.

{% instagram B3-C2asBokb %} Dagens tips: om ni cyklar från tåget till träningen, cykla inte igenom pölarna. De är längre, bredare och framför allt djupare än de ser ut. Dina fötter kommer att hamna under vattnet där du cyklar. Riktigt ordentligt. Och när ni väl cyklar i pölen kan ni inte vända om.1 Om ni trots det cyklar igenom pölarna, se åtminstone till att ni har bytesbyxor, -strumpor och -skor för kvällen och hemvägen.

Man kan säja mycket om Sheriffen av Nottingham, men klok är han inte. Sheriffen är inte en glad eller förnuftig man. Han flippar vanligen mellan förnedrad och förnedrande, och i scenen då han äntligen fått Robin Hood i klorna är han rent vansinnig. Det är kanske oxå skäl att påminna att Robin Hood inte är en barnpjäs. Vi har rekommenderat en åldersgräns på sju, men stundvis kan det tyckas att tolv är en mer realistisk rekommendation.

Varje ny början kommer från slutet av en tidigare början. Ungefär så sa Seneca1, eller Dan Wilson från orkestern Semisonic. Och precis så kändes det när jag sent om sider kom i säng igår efter Nyländsk Afton, Nylands teatermotsvarighet till Oscargalan. Det var där Kapten Efraim Långstrump fick uppträda för sista gången, och Sheriffen av Nottingham den första. På onsdag kväll träffades Pippi-gänget för en första och enda träning inför NSU-galan.

{% instagram B2kP4CVBNVp %} Vi fick teaterkläderna härom dagen och de ser förfärligt snitsiga ut. Kläderna är från en affär i Sankt Karins som specialiserar sej på medeltida jox och attiraljer. Ännu har vi inte haft träning i kostym, men en del klädprovning har det varit redan. En sak som är uppenbar är att medeltida kläder inte är av riktigt lika mjukt material som moderna, och det gäller även medeltida kläder gjorda på detta årtusende.

Jag står mitt emellan två kapitel just nu. Eller mer specifikt, mitt emellan två skådespel. Det är ett veckoslut kvar av Robin Hood på Fallåker. Nästa lördag spelar vi dubbelfinal och sen lägger Nottingwood lapp på luckan. Det är samtidigt både skönt och lite dystert, men så ska det väl vara. Åtminstone vet jag att teatrandet inte tar slut bara för att teatern gör det. Saltkråkan-övningarna för nästa års Finns-produktion är ren i full gång.

2020 2021 2022 I’ll be at Macaduk in May November 2020 March 2022, or whenever Macaduk will be held, talking about Security for Humans. I had, at some stage, thought about the subject The Human Sysadmin but maybe that’s a bit too big of a subject, best saved for when i have some more experience in flapping my lips in front of a paying audience. 2019 My first ever public talk, on security in an official setting, at Macaduk 2019.

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.

It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

Adding a second layer of authentication to your account is essential for your security, but like having a lock on your door, it can lock you out when things go wrong. You really need to think of the spare keys before that happens.

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.

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.

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.

The first time you contact an ssh server, you’re presented with a fingerprint and asked whether you want to trust the server to be who it is, based on this fingerprint. Blindly, i might add. If you’re at least a bit concerned about (usable) security, this should send a few shivers down your spine; how the heck are you supposed to know whether this fingerprint is right or not. If you’re managing your servers with ansible, this query can be inconvenient, as it stops your flow at some random place and it’s not entirely clear where it will commence.

{{ note msg=“This is a totally untechnical, unapologetically self-absorbed post.” }}

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.

The good news is that summer holiday in Finland is four weeks, or as i have so many extra hours worked in, five. Five weeks paid holiday. Whoa.

Låt mej börja med att blåsa luften ur myten med en skopa verklighet, så får vi det undanklarat: Sheriffen av Nottingham, så som han beskrivs i sagan om Robin Hood, har aldrig existerat. Robin Hood har antagligen aldrig heller existerat, men det tar vi en annan dag. Händelserna kring Robin Hood-historien utspelar sej nämligen riktigt is slutet av 1100-talet, närmare bestämt år 1193-11941 och Nottingham fick sin första sheriff år 1449, alltså nästan 250 år senare (och Robin Hood-sagan handlar i sin populärt berättade form inte om tidsresande :).

I’m not very good at throwing old stuff away. On the Internet, storage space is nearly infinite (in comparison to my brain). So i rather archive than delete. I’m like a squirrel in that way. Thus, i decided that i wanted to keep my old Now posts, to turn the Now section into something akin to a blog. How easy i though it was. This site is built on Hugo, a static web site generator.

I have a hobby i haven’t written much about here. I sing. I started to sing by a happy happenstance and a fortunate misunderstanding when i was the Nights Watch at the music camp my kids were at and i thought the commanding “Everyone must come to the singing auditions” really meant everyone and not just the campers. I was scared to bits, but after getting over the terror, i started really liking it!

The last ten or eleven days, i’ve been on a music camp with my kids. Well, mostly it’s been the kids doing the music and me looking out during the night. But i was in the “adult ensemble”, where we practiced these two songs, Alta Trinità beata and I skovens dybe stille ro. The first of these is an old Italian religious song, the other a Danish folk song. Since i’m not much of a singer and because i don’t read sheet music very well, i try to teach myself my stuff by transcribing the notes into a notation software (called MuseScore).

Idag fick jag ett samtal. Damen på andra sidan ville veta om jag fortfarande var intresserad att hjälpa till som statist i en film. Visst, sade jag, vad behöver jag veta? Min karaktär är journalist och jag har två (!) repliker. Och så undrar hon om jag kan skicka en ny bild. En halvtimme senare kommer ett nytt samtal. Tidseran för filmen är nittiotalet och regissören säjer att skägget ska bort.

Last week, i was involved with Reaktor Breakpoint, a tech, design, business and future conference with about 600 attendees and twenty-odd speakers.

Unlike with last Breakpoint in 2015, i wasn’t involved in the planning bits, i just worked with the execution. On the surface, my job sounds trivial. I was to make sure all presenters' slides were delivered to the right stages, in time, before each presenter’s show, and looking awesome.

I like to emphasize the last word of the previous paragraph, because that is your job and the job of nearly everyone working backstage or in production: making the presenter look, sound, and feel awesome.

While delivering slides may sound like the job of a glorified runner, it was actually quite a bit of logistics than i’d originally expected.

One day i’m going to die, which is something i might as well come to terms with. It’s not like i’m in any kind of hurry to die; i rather like living and i’d prefer to postpone the inevitable end as much as is easily possible. But after i’m dead, i’ll leave a big digital heap of memories behind me, and that’s what this post is about: making those memories accessible to my near and dear, if that’s what they want.

Idag är jag statist i filmningen av en finsk deckare. Sorjonen och muralmorden, eller det som heter Bordertown på Netflix. Kameran går och det är lite pirrigt. Det andra gången jag medverkar, på ett mycket litet plan, i film. Första gången var jag “reporter” i Den svavelgula himlen och eftersom jag hade en (1) replik, var jag skådespelare – filmskådespelare! – och idag är jag statist, på hemligstemplad ort och gör som regissören säjer.

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

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.

The first time you contact an ssh server, you’re presented with a fingerprint and asked whether you want to trust the server to be who it is, based on this fingerprint. Blindly, i might add. If you’re at least a bit concerned about (usable) security, this should send a few shivers down your spine; how the heck are you supposed to know whether this fingerprint is right or not. If you’re managing your servers with ansible, this query can be inconvenient, as it stops your flow at some random place and it’s not entirely clear where it will commence.

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.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

Idag är jag statist i filmningen av en finsk deckare. Sorjonen och muralmorden, eller det som heter Bordertown på Netflix. Kameran går och det är lite pirrigt. Det andra gången jag medverkar, på ett mycket litet plan, i film. Första gången var jag “reporter” i Den svavelgula himlen och eftersom jag hade en (1) replik, var jag skådespelare – filmskådespelare! – och idag är jag statist, på hemligstemplad ort och gör som regissören säjer.

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.

{% instagram CLKNMZpB-mk %} Så var det ett nånslags genrep för Stulen Kärlek, för en massiv publik på fem personer. Jädra corona, minns ni? Det började … ja, först satte inte musiken igång, men sen började det riktigt fint. Ända tills jag blackade ut just när jag skulle säja min femte replik, vilket var både fasansfullt och jättekonstigt – allt bara försvann framför mej – men lyckligtvis var vår regissör Frank på hugget, så jag kunde haka på utan att tappa känslan.

{{ note msg=“This is a totally untechnical, unapologetically self-absorbed post.” }}

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.

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

I’m kind of fond of the HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 series switches. They are mostly no-nonsense and fairly nice to configure from the command line.

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.

UPDATE! HOLD YOUR HORSES! THIS MIGHT NOT WORK! STILL REQUIRES MORE INVESTIGATION! DO NOT USE! AT LEAST NOT IN PRODUCTION! I AM SO SORRY! IT WAS MY FAULT! Update on the update! I found the problem and i will post about that soon. The article below is part of the solution, but it will require another trick. Now please read on, at your own risk :) HP has a strange way of (not) distributing proper drivers for their printers.

It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

Today i learned that you can enter the recovery mode through the Boot Volume selector when starting up a Mac. Until today, i’ve booted the computer, hurried up to hold down ⌘ R for an unknown amount of time and hoped i got the timing right. Now, i boot with the Alt (Option) key down, wait for the boot volume selector and then press ⌘ R. Okay, so it’s another unnecessary step, but somehow i feel less stressed.

Your network will always grow, and due to the laws of entropy, left to itself, it’ll grow messier. Here are some things to consider while it’s still small and manageable:

One day i’m going to die, which is something i might as well come to terms with. It’s not like i’m in any kind of hurry to die; i rather like living and i’d prefer to postpone the inevitable end as much as is easily possible. But after i’m dead, i’ll leave a big digital heap of memories behind me, and that’s what this post is about: making those memories accessible to my near and dear, if that’s what they want.

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.

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.

For some strange reason, i realized that there’s a spot in my old MSc Thesis which says it’s available on line. So i thought i’d follow up on that promise and make sure it is. And while i was at it, i wrote a whole page about how to (not) write your thesis. So there. Now for some truly unfathomable reason, the link to the thesis page doesn’t show if you’re reading the preview of this.

So you’re tired of the standard profile pictures, don’t want to use the camera, don’t have a Mac Server? Here’s a fairly simple workaround to use any picture as your profile picture.

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.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

Today i learned that you can enter the recovery mode through the Boot Volume selector when starting up a Mac. Until today, i’ve booted the computer, hurried up to hold down ⌘ R for an unknown amount of time and hoped i got the timing right. Now, i boot with the Alt (Option) key down, wait for the boot volume selector and then press ⌘ R. Okay, so it’s another unnecessary step, but somehow i feel less stressed.

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

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.

It’s surprisingly easy to share two factor authentication among your peers (depending on your definition of ‘easy’). You’ll need just a little work on the command line to prove that any of you are, in fact, you.

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.

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.

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

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.

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.