My Little Pocket Universe
Scott Garrett When archiving videos, often times there is a logo of some sort that really distracts. Or even worse, is put in by someone who had nothing to do with actually making the video like they are taking credit for the hard work of the production company. I ran into a case of the latter, and … Read more
One shortcoming of the native settings on the iPhone and the iPad is that you can’t easily set up on-demand or automatic VPNs. While there is no way to do it in the GUI, you can, however create a profile and install it with all the necessary information and logic. Profiles are just XML documents … Read more
While I was updating some settings with my bind server on Ubuntu 20, I noticed a lot of queries for “pizzaseo.com”, which appears to be some kind of marketing company trying to scrape for data. On reading out in forums about it, apparently they’re looking for vulnerable pi-hole servers that are exposed to the internet. … Read more
It’s particularly irritating when security people who have a limited grasp of security set password rules in your domain that force you to change your password way too frequently. It’s even worse when it remembers a history of passwords that you cannot reuse. I am not condoning never changing your password, but a very complex/long … Read more
I was looking for a way to compare compression ratios with different algorithms, and didn’t want to have to run them in serial. So I started digging and found a nice bash syntax that allows you to do just that. And just for fun, it calculates the sha checksum as well. curl -s https://someserver.com/file.txt | … Read more
I recently discovered the Blink SSH client for iOS, and am loving it. It finally makes the iPad actually useful as a mobile ssh workstation in an understated elegant way. However, I really don’t care for most of the popular fonts that are used by newer terminal applications. I am proudly old school, and decided … Read more
When I am converting videos from one format to another, I often need to convert the susbtitles as well. I wrote a script to extract (and convert PGS to VobSub). This is a bash script that I am running on my Mac. If you want to run it on linux, just update the PATHs to … Read more
Subtitles come in a myriad of formats, and not all of them work in every container format, and not all containers are as easy to work with. Converting Matroska (mkv) files to MP4s cause issues when the mkv has PGS (Blu-Ray) subtitles. PGS subtitles can be embedded in Matroska video files, but not MP4s. But … Read more
A while back, I found a nice TrueType font that mimicked the old DEC terminals. It was made by taking the ROMs of a DEC VT220, and creating the TTF font based on that data. It occurred to me that it would also make a really great replacement for the linux console font, where it … Read more
Sometimes it’s desirable to have a back door into a system that is behind a firewall. ssh is a security person’s best friend, and worst nightmare. This is more in the latter category, but as an admin, incredibly useful. I have a server that I can get outbound connections to anywhere, but do not have … Read more