Let’s Encrypt in Public Beta

Let’s Encrypt is now in public beta phase. It allows you to create free unlimited trusted SSL certificates that work in all browsers (all relevant browsers anyway). There are now no excuses for adding SSL encryption to your website(s). That isn’t to say that Let’s Encrypt isn’t without flaws: the certificates you can get are […]

Mandrill support for vBulletin

Update February 2016: Mandrill has announced changes that if I understand them correctly would mean for my sending volume I’d go from paying $65 in the past two years to $30/month in the future. Needless to say, I’ll be moving away from them a.s.a.p. and do not recommend them anymore to anyone! Of course I […]

Keep WordPress & phpMyAdmin up-to-date with a single command II

A few years ago I wrote about keeping WordPress & phpMyAdmin up-to-date with a single command. While those methods still work it is time to make a few changes (and revive this blog while I’m at it, it has been too long). First off, using Subversion to track stable versions might keep WordPress itself up-to-date […]

Mac OS X Time Machine backup on a Debian server

December 2015: I just wanted to note that the solution below stopped working for me after a while. However I recently purchased a Synology NAS and configuring as a Time Machine backup destination is fairly easy. I just got a MacBook Air and had already read about how you can setup your own network based […]

Hiding MySQL/PostgreSQL password from the “ps” command

If you want to run a database tool for MySQL from the command line it would seem you cannot avoid including the password using a –password argument. The problem is that the whole command line while the command is being run will be visible to any other user of the same server using the “ps” […]