It's not easy being queen (of the numbats)! Here's how to get it working. First, get your IKE VPN stuff ready, like server certificate, client user/pass or certificate/key, server IP, etc.

Install all the needed packages. You'll notice that strongswan-plugin-eap-mschapv2 is no longer a package,...

This is a copy-pasted and edited rant that was originally a series of chat messages but seemed worthwhile to save. HeatSync Labs is the hackerspace I helped co-found in 2009. Champions are HSL's name for chief board executives, and HYH or Hack Your Hackerspace is the regular member meeting where shop business is discussed and voted upon, and shop maintenance or projects are undertaken, with the goal of members self-governing rather than the Board issuing many top-down edicts or directly running many day-to-day programs.

HeatSync has survived for 13 years due to certain aspects of its self-sufficiency, altruism, and cooperativeness. One of the core jobs of the Champions is to attract and inspire people who want to give money, give time/energy, or both… to a ragtag bunch of tinkerers and underserved demographics like kids, low-income or underprivileged people, etc. So when we advertise and put calls for members or volunteers into the world, we try make it attract the right people. One of the fastest ways to kill a makerspace would be to be on the front page of a newspaper and have a thousand people show up at the front door thinking that this is a literal "build-a-bear" for 3d printing, or a daycare, because that's likely not what volunteers signed up for. The difference between the two is in the language and concepts used to advertise.

We've looked at having big sponsors, but nobody seems to have $5,000,000 laying around to help tinkerers tinker without strings attached. I don't think there's money in hackerspaces for the same reasons that there's no money in libraries or rec centers: the instant that you monetize it and turn it into a book store or a gym you lose something important.

The most valuable thing I know for an individual to do isn't hunting for big sponsors or setting up a grantwriting infrastructure, but just to inspire lots of other people to donate $50/mo: inspiring through your energy and actions.

It took me way too long to figure out how to dump an xml document or xml node to a string (memory) or a file export in C, so here are some premade functions ready for use.

void xml\_node\_to\_file(char \*path, xmlDoc \*document, xmlNode \*node) {
    FILE \*f;
    f = fopen(path, "w");
    xmlElem...

The fireplace

The part needing repair

With repeated operation, the heat safety switch / integrated thermostat can get a buildup of carbon (soot) on its contacts after a lot of usage. You'll know this could be the problem when the light bulb part of the fireplace works fine, but not the fan b...

Here's a great way to search /aws/rds/cluster slowquery logs in CloudWatch for entries with a high "row examined" count:

parse @message "*Rows_examined: *\n*" as full, rows | display full, rows | filter rows > 200000 | fields @timestamp, @message | sort @timestamp desc | limit 20

Change "200000"...

Photo of an Ergodox, with acrylic+wood case, elevated by almost an inch via rubber stoppers.

Why bother 3d printing a whole tenting kit when you can get away with something simple quick and cheap? I bought size 000 rubber stoppers, just under an inch tall and half an inch wide, from the hardware...

There are some tricks to getting this working: using the wrong CalDAV URL, username, password, sync tool, or version can cause a lot of frustration. Here's what worked for me here in 2021.

The Holmes HAPF21 (G) replacement air filter and the HAP222 itself has been discontinued, but if you still want to keep using it you can buy a Honeywell (or generic Flintar) HRF201B ("U") filter and cut it to size with scissors. It's almost exactly the same width and just a little bit longer, and as...

If you get this error:

ImportError: cannot import name 'ogr' from 'osgeo'

The most likely cause, assuming you've tried to install osgeo directly, is that you installed osgeo from pip and got this package: https://pypi.org/project/osgeo/#history (osgeo-0.0.0-py3-none-any.whl) -- which, if you l...

When I was a kid, my mom would make "Poor Man's Beef Stroganoff" with ground beef, mushroom soup, and no additional dairy. I kicked it up with steak tips and a bit of milk for the sauce but kept it affordable and easy.

• Prep Time: 5 minutes
• Cook Time: 15 minutes
• Total Time: 20 minutes
• Y...

Let me tell you a story. In my previous job I was the IT Manager at a real estate office. One of our construction guys always asked us questions about how to work his Blackberry smartphone. This guy was ten white hairs away from being a perfect church Santa Claus, like 75 years old, showed us pictur...

[caption id="attachment_645" align="aligncenter" width="1080"] Miso Ramen with gai lan (Chinese broccoli)[/caption]

• Adapted from: Pickled Plum and Mike's Mighty Good
• Prep Time: 15 minutes
• Cook Time: 10 minutes
• Total Time: 25 minutes
• Yield: 2 servings
• Category: Noodles
• Metho...

So for me it wasn't obvious, but when you're running make on the subscribe_publish_sample and getting a ton of warnings and errors like "exit 0" and "exec(exit) failed (No such file or directory)" and "Need an operator" and "Wildcard expanding .prevent_execution" it's because FreeBSD uses a diff...

In order to laser-cut a map of middle earth for an art project, I first had to find a suitable vector. It seems a lot of the files online have disappeared. This one is simply a scan and vector trace of a rather-complete version of the original map, but extra painstaking work has been done to flatten...

I got a bout of nostalgia the other day and decided that Phoenix (602, 480, 623) and Santa Rosa (707) needed Time and Temperature phone numbers again, in the retro style of the 90s and prior.

So if you need to hear a friendly robot voice, or want to know the weather or time, call:

707-210-1917

Recently some local coffee shops have seemingly begun to use routers provided by the ISP which hand out IPv6 addresses. Nobody else seems to have issues with this (even my phone seems fine) but my laptop is unhappy with the situation.

Initial debugging via ifconfig shows that I am only getting I...

If you're seeing random sites pop up with transparency warnings, it's due to a new Chrome rollout of that requirement. However they've allegedly rolled it back, but Chromium users may be stuck on the strict version.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1641380

https://...

Homemade WYSIWYG installations as part of homemade blog engines or CMSes remind me of that children's book, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie."

If you give a user a blog_posts database table and three form fields, they're going to want to format things... like bold, headline, paragraphs, and links.

I left our first DMV appointment practically empty-handed despite being a 30-year-old college-educated web programmer, and spending probably two hours researching and preparing for our DMV visit. If I got confused and forgot some necessary documents, I'm sure it's nearly impossible for most people w...

If you're using Ansible with the AWS EC2 plugin ec2_eni and getting this error:

AttributeError: 'NetworkInterface' object has no attribute 'attach'

The problem is that the boto NetworkInterface object indeed does not have anything called "attach" -- you're probably using an old version of boto;...

Warning, this alternative appears to be more reliable than mine, please visit here and ignore what's written below: https://github.com/johnboiles/BaofengUV5R-TRRS

[caption id="attachment_536" align="alignnone" width="1024"] This cable follows the below diagram precisely; note the color-coded h...

I got this error after adding an onKernelRequest listener to my Symfony project and trying to pass Twig_Environment to it as an argument. It worked via the web browser, but not in any PHPUnit tests hitting multiple pages.

After much head scratching and reading of the Symfony source code, I ended u...

Using this as a guide ( http://wiki.rsyslog.com/index.php/Working_Apache_and_Rsyslog_configuration )  I was able to get Apache's access log, filtered, forwarding to my Papertrail instance (via syslog / rsyslog). It may be useful to someone:

Redhat/Centos httpd.conf and/or your virtualhost conf -...

A lot of tutorials are showing you how to create embedded forms with associations/relations -- what about unrelated entities?

I figured out you can pass the second entity as a parameter to the parent form, pass it normally to the embedded form via the 'data' parameter, which will let the embedded...

Sometimes you really need to know what computers on your network were doing yesterday at noon, because you get a nastygram from the MPAA about bittorrent demanding that you do something -- but bittorrent is notoriously hard to block.

You can try installing BandwidthD on your Pfsense router, to see...

Sometimes you want to know if an IP is private or not. Here's some Javascript: https://gist.github.com/zyphlar/8e7b2017a5d925ddd12c

Coming from Rails, I know that DRY (don't repeat yourself) is a virtue. In my Symfony PHP project, I was faced with copy-pasting a hundred lines in order to test a bunch of methods in PHPUnit. So, I wrote a quick wrapper to take in the arguments as minimally as possible instead of cluttering up the...

How The Internet Really Works: A Hands-On Crash Course from Ethernet to HTTP using Wireshark

Whether you're a hacker, IT pro, coder, or just curious, it helps to know exactly how the Internet works: you may understand the idea of connections, but do you understand all the protocols and steps that...

Many people have been asking me about starting hackerspaces/makerspaces lately. I'm going to use this post to aggregate their questions and my answers.

What do you think about doing a Kickstarter for seed money?

It's possible, but "the HeatSync Way" is to find your people first. To do this kind...

This is a cached copy of a blog post from www.farmckon.net/2012/09/there-are-no-structureless-groups/‎ because I think this is a valuable thing to keep and share about so-called "leaderless" organizational structures. I'm not the author.

There are no structureless groups

In the past, one o...

1-month update! See the bottom of the post.

6-month update! See the bottom again.

1-year update! Seriously, see the bottom.

2-year update at the bottom!

Finally, a 3-year update!

Criteria

As a programmer I needed a laptop that was powerful, lightweight, had a keyboard I liked, and ran Li...

I just got a message on the HeatSync Labs Facebook account asking about how we started; figured I'd post it here since it's a common (and necessary) question:

What was the goal when Heatsync was still in its building phase?

To create a place that removes obstacles to people making things;...

I decided I wanted to make 120 volt AC things get switched on and off via a 24 volt DC signal -- so I bought a nice 10amp, 240volt relay at the local Circuit Specialists electronic store and started wiring stuff up as best to code as I know how. (Every time I see this kind of project online, t...

The Phoenix-area collab spaces have their own Movember this year, in which we have a mustache/beard grow-off for charity!

Everyone else at HeatSync Labs appears to have chickened out except for the amazing Austin "Scorche" Appel, so I've gotta take one for the team and together we can show...

Someone shared with me an article from the Forbes blog The Apothecary (link here: http://is.gd/5rTNEa -- not a direct link because I don't want to support the guy's PageRank) which claims "Obamacare Will Increase Health Spending By $7,450 For A Typical Family of Four." There was some debate about wh...

So you're trying to get some random program to work when you run exec() or shell_exec() via PHP in Windows; it works when you run it from the command line, but not when you run the same exact script via the web. Maybe it even returns an elusive 255 retval error code.

The first thing you should do...

The heat killed the 3.5mm line-in port on my car, it wouldn't sense the cord being plugged in and I had to pull it to one side to get it to work. Fortunately you can pull off the cover and pull out the plug from the front without tearing apart the whole dash. Then I soldered a wire between the senso...

I'm tasked with localizing a huge Rails app, and it's no fun, so I found some tools to help me and made a couple tools myself.

I now have a great script workflow that:

• https://github.com/balinterdi/i15r
  • finds 80% of strings in .erb files and symbolizes them (do a dry run first, or git diff...

All the diagrams I found online sucked, so I quickly drew a slightly better one. Hosted here for posterity.

Apparently the kerfluffle du jour is about meritocracy in the tech industry. I first stumbled across some tweets about "meritocracy" and then clicked back to an article written earlier today; I'm no expert on this debate but I did have one observation to make.

When I hear about meritocracy i...

Are you a business owner or accountant who does a bunch of business via PayPal? I am, and I hate figuring out how to account for PayPal fees in QuickBooks by hand. I asked a fellow HeatSync Labs member, Mark from Hypoxic, what he does and he has this script to automatically separate out the fees int...

So I spent ~20 hours of time isolating and working around an old, as-yet-unfixed openssl bug in Ubuntu 12.04. When using this code to connect to an HTTPS/SSL/TLS1.0 SOAP server:

ini_set( "soap.wsdl_cache_enabled", "0" ); $objSoapClient = new SoapClient( 'https://EXAMPLE.COM/EXAMPLEWSDLPATH', arr...

So let's say you have a crazy client who needs some crazy front-end stuff because you're not able to touch the back-end stuff! You need to save people's form fields across reloads, etc. Cookies to the rescue! https://gist.github.com/zyphlar/3831934

Ever wanted to make a twitter sign? Of course you have. I do too, so I made one! My goal was to have minimal hardware so that the sign can easily be mounted anywhere, so I used a Linksprite WiFi DiamondBack Arduino to connect wirelessly to the Internet and control the sign.

But first, how to g...

Got an IP webcam but need to show it on your website? Cheap cameras frequently have crappy interfaces or login requirements. Using CURL and PHP, you can work around a number of issues while also hiding the username/password/port your webcam is actually on.

With a bit more work, you could even cach...

I've got a tiny cheap computer from Alix that I'm trying to set up as a digital display. The trick was getting it to open Chrome on startup, and setting the screen resolution correctly on widescreen TVs that apparently don't report their preferred resolutions like monitors do.

Here's a script...

I needed a quick way to check how many calls were going to voicemail versus being dropped or answered, since the CDR in my version of FreePBX doesn't show such detail. Might be useful for other logfile parsing (with regex!).

Here's the code: https://gist.github.com/zyphlar/2994842

So you might have heard about the LinkedIn password hack the other day. Maybe you've changed your password, anywhere that your LinkedIn password was used! Good. Us admins still have to worry, though. Here's why:

The vast, vast majority of passwords especially for social media will be 6-8 character...

Shadow copies and VSS writers are pains in the ass. Sometimes you'll try to shutdown Windows and it'll freeze for hours stuck at the "Windows is shutting down" screen because it can't shut down the VSS shadow copy providers are also hung.

To get around this, I'll usually shut down those servers wi...

Do you have (or want) an IP camera that uploads video to an FTP server, but frustrated because all IP cameras seem to do is upload still frame JPEGs? Frustrate no more! I have written a Linux shell/bash script that timestamps and video-fies these images into video for your consumption.

Behold: htt...

When I set up a new website, I like to put a basic welcome page in the public_html folder to test that it's working and look halfway decent. Here's what I use. It just echoes the hostname from PHP, thus providing feedback that both Apache and PHP are working (along with DNS, hopefully)

Code: https...

It can be a pain to add new monitors in Nagios -- so I made a script!

Check it: https://gist.github.com/zyphlar/2051455

I've got this simple digital signage script floating around that I repurpose a lot. Recently added Asterisk logs to it, so I can see minor fluctuations and trends like lagged peers in addition to other stuff I've written like my Nagios monitor. Here's the script! https://gist.github.com/zyphlar/...

Hot on the heels of my Arduino Nagios Display, I've made a kit version of the LED matrix that is much easier to assemble! It's daisy-chainable, so you only need however many rows you want. Perfect for workshops where you want to introduce someone to shift registers and LED matrixes but don't want to...

Reviewing my system, I realized one script I take advantage of the most is a logging script I made years ago to track logins.

I mainly use it to see who is using which computer, saving on guesswork and coming in very handy when troubleshooting weird problems. It also comes in handy when tracking d...

You may realize that giving out admin rights (i.e. adding someone to the Administrators group) is a bad thing. But your boss and/or favorite employee might be demanding that they need them in order to do their job. You feel stuck. What do you do?

First, you need to learn something: the Administra...

I recently waded into a debate about whether people in an organization should be given local administrator access to their machines.

Now firstly, this violates the principle of least privilege, which is what all of security is based on. You don't get it unless you need it; you get the minimal pr...

_This is a comment I posted on Paul Gregory's Forbes post about Mr. Buffet's Secretary's salary-- saying that for her to be paying less than him (assuming a 15% rate) then she'd have to be making over $200k, meaning she's not such a poster child for injustice after all. (I guess God only has pity...

Getting notified by SMS is better than via email, I think, because then you can tell the difference between midnight spam and a server fire. Here's my command for sending a shortened message (to #yournumber#@YourCarrierSMSGateway.com)

Add these to your commands.cfg and then change your contact set...

I like the Whiteline icon set for Nagios' statusmap cgi, but it's too big; here it is resized to 40px wide and I added an Ubuntu icon as well.

Download: whiteline.zip

See my earlier Nagios post

Sometimes padlocks, zip ties, sternly-worded signs and keyed ignitions just don't cut it. Maybe what you're looking for is something more like...

...a web-enabled RFID interlock loosely based on 23b's Open Access Control system? Indeed! This is a horrible photo, but inside the lovingly-crafted...

The Minecraft release party, MineCon, was this year in Las Vegas. In a flash of inspiration, I knew I'd found my first cosplay opportunity. Most people would wear cardboard boxes, which isn't very Vegas. What Minecraft-themed costume would fit Vegas, aside from old people in sweatpants gambling thei...

The movie 'Hackers' came out in 1995, when I was still in elementary school. So by the time I grew up and watched it (along with the Matrix and Tron) I knew that the kinds of computer visualization depicted in those movies was something I wanted. I'm a very visual person (and I think computers are g...

People want lots of money these days for digital signage, but lots of it is mediocre at best and especially lacking in third-party data sources. How much money is it worth to edit HTML by hand? About the cost of decent digital signage software! So I made my own with pure Javascript and JQuery goodne...

So you've got Ubuntu 11.04 and think you'll use Nagios and its fun plugin, NRPE, to monitor your cloud servers, right? Sure! There are some gotchas though. Read on. Note: You may want to check out check_mk instead of NRPE as it is reportedly sexier. For readability I'll start with the remote serve...

Why buy an expensive disk or flash drive duplicator when you can make one yourself with Linux for free or cheap?

Here are the cloning scripts you can use to copy a disk and then write it back to a large number of target disks. Modify the IMAGE.img and /dev/DEVICE as desired (each "of=" is another...

This is the line I put in a Scheduled Task to download a remote directory and save it locally. You should be able to use it in reverse to upload something.

"C:Program FilesWinSCPWinSCP.exe" /console /log=winscp.log /command "option batch on" "option confirm off" "open USERNAME:PASSWORD@EXAMPLE.com...

Ever needed to access, or maintain access, to a computer that's behind a firewall? Just run one of these commands on that computer (in Linux or maybe Mac) and you'll get a tunnel to that computer's port 22 (SSH) over whatever port you type for the PORTNUM in the examples below.

First example: ssh...

Long pretentious blog titles are apparently my new thing.

One big problem I have had in trying to use cloud infrastructure for Real World Applications is that a huge percentage of those apps (or their protocols) don't communicate securely. For example, I just set up an SMB share (Windows fileshare...

So I'm teaching a friend how to set up Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Here's my version of teaching you how to do it.

Linux:

• Download and install Ubuntu (Server or Desktop.) See instructions here. Install with the default options, or just run the Desktop version from USB.

LINUX PRIMER:

•...

This was a comment I posted to this topic on DreamInCode forums.

The most frustrating part of R'ing T F'ing M is usually "ok but how do I do this thing I want to do?" I see MSDN now has a Remarks section with Common Tasks, so as long as what you want to do is there I could see that being an impr...

HeatSync Labs is having a vintage videogame night soon, led by the inimitable Corey Renner, and it inspired me not only to break out my Intellivision but to honor the granddaddy of electronic gaming, Tennis for Two.

The original was made with basic electrical devices in 1958, but to...

Hacker in the original sense.

These "caveats" are derived and repurposed from the Zen Caveats. Funny how well Zen and technology fit together. Many are presented without modification. If you like this, try reading the Rootless Root.

• Following the rules and protecting the regulations is b...

Linux webservers like Ubuntu (and CentOS, etc) can sometimes be confusing for new admins who aren't sure how to do proper backups or migrate websites and databases between servers. It takes awhile, but you eventually get a toolkit of scripts, commands, or techniques that work for you. If you're luck...

While trying to install AFS ImageDepot Express for a user, I ran into some issues, namely the following error:

unable to configure local datasource

as well as a problem with "exclusive access to file" when trying to change the datasource in the program. Turns out that by giving the user Modi...

I just moved a Concrete5 website from one Ubuntu server to another, yet for some reason submitting an email form (a Form block) results in some major errors-- looking in the Concrete5 log under /dashboard/reports/logs shows an "Unable to send mail" error.

Here's how I fixed it. The problem occurs...

I recently joined in a discussion on the Spiceworks Forums, reprinted here for your benefit.

First a lesson on what Class A/B/C means, and then a suggestion for supernetting:

The Class A/B/C designations are more or less meaningless now as we have CIDR (classless subnets) to give us nearly w...

You've probably heard of test-driven programming, where the first thing a developer writes is an automated test, not the actual program code. This way when the code is written, it can instantly and repeatedly be tested to see if it works.

Why not do the same in an IT department, or any other endea...

How can an inexperienced "tech guy" help his organization IT-wise, if outsourcing isn't on the table?

As an unwittingly frequent mentor to technical hopefuls, it's hard to draw the line between "sure just follow these steps" and "it's over your head, outsource if at all possible." How do you disti...

Here's the slides from my Technical Brownbag today at Gangplank.

Thanks for having me, guys! Please comment on your thoughts or anything you have to add.

Edit: One of the biggest security holes is the HTTPS issue. Please please PLEASE install and use an SSL cert on every webserver you run. Word...

Most people are blissfully unaware of what security means in the 21st century, despite using 21st-century technology daily. Many nerds are aware of attacks like viruses, trojans, and phishing, and many computer users are familiar with the idea that passwords are important and that their hard drives'...

In order to login via Remote Desktop on Windows XP, you must be a member of the local machine's Remote Desktop Users group. This is slightly different than on Windows Server, where you can modify the permissions of Terminal Services and define custom groups to be allowed access.

Additionally, you'...

I recently had my car serviced for an intermittent, weird noise-- it's 3 years old and just started making a weird clutch noise over the past few months. My experience was pretty average (read: mildly frustrating) and my response to a Honda phone survey resulted in a disappointed voicemail from Davi...

This is a comment I posted on WebProWorld after a quick Google search to see what the consensus was on right nav in webdesign. It represents my current analysis of the issue.

I think, when designing your site, you should know which direction visitors' eyes will go. In L-to-R reading countrie...

Better code for doing a date-based countdown in Javascript. The top results on Google appear to have been written in 1990 and are unnecessarily cumbersome-- here's a version I wrote for a quick Christmas "countdown" webpage.

One major advantage to my version is that it compensates for the date in...

This is a reply to a post here: http://gangplankhq.com/2009/11/gangplank-looking-to-move-downtown/

Whether Tempe is a poser or Phoenix is sucky or Chandler is a thriving tech incubator is somewhat diluted by their public perception. I think perception is reality-- if the public thinks something,...

This site is the personal blog counterpart to my professional site, zyphon.com

This was originally posted as a comment to http://mutiny.in/2009/01/01/divided-we-stand and inspired me to add similar philosophical discussions to my blog in the future. The thesis of the original post was, is complete globalization necessary to achieve peace?  My thoughts below.

Globalization in...

This just in: the Monte Carlo Hotel in Las Vegas is on fire. Stay tuned for pictures, coming as soon as wireless networks will allow.

http://www.montecarlo.com

Update: Photo credits Jason Gordy. "Fire started just before 11am. " "[not a terrorist attack], noone’s hurt, everyone’s rescued, nobo...

We're sensitized to the wrong things and desensitized to the right things. We worry about bird flu but don't take our daily vitamins. We call 9/11 and Katrina wake-up calls, but then fail to follow through with adequate action.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/26/cover.story.tm/index.html?eref=rss_to...

I just caught a bit on the news about Armitage's "Notify and Walk" suggestion. Hey, for a former Bush official and someone who loves to gossip about the secret identities of CIA spies, he's got a point.

Earlier this week, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suggested a gradual...

It's kind of hard to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis when you are firing a quarter of a million bullets per day in their homeland.

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