Bryan Fullerton's Blog

Movie Reviews - April 2021

Wow, it's been a whole year since I wrote any movie reviews. You'd think that staying home in a pandemic would give me lots of time to do blog entries, but apparently it more just leads to being too exhausted to do anything from stress. Fun. I have been watching

FreeBSD

Installing miniflux on FreeBSD

After trying to figure out why FreshRSS does not update my feeds as frequently as I expect – it's supposed to do it every 20min, but my cron jobs every 30min only seem to show updates every few hours? – I decided to check out what other self-hosted RSS readers are around

Web

One Apache config for multiple environments

Today I added on to a bit of Apache configuration I wrote several years ago and was impressed by how past me had done it, so thought I'd write a blog post. Challenge: Have one Apache VirtualHost config that can be deployed to all of an app's environments, supporting settings

Movies

Movie Reviews - April 2020

I wrote most of this post back over the past couple of months, but things got busy and I didn't finish and post. But here we are now well into April and the self-isolation life, figure I should periodically take some time to update here. Reminder that this is my

Useful

Netflix and IPv6 blocks and FreeBSD router

I've had issues for several years with mobile devices (particularly iPads) on my home network accessing Netflix. The loading spinner in the Netflix app just goes around and around and eventually times out with an error, and nothing ever works. None of the "Netflix doesn't work on my iPad" troubleshooting

Movie Reviews - December 2019

It's been so long since my last review post, I think I originally started writing this one in May and just kept pushing it out. Hopefully I can do at least one more over the end of year holidays, but we'll see how that goes. I have at least been

Useful

Removing Hyper-V from Windows 10

Hyper-V is pretty cool, and I enjoyed playing with it, especially in conjunction with Ubuntu's Multipass tool. However, once I finished playing with it – I have an Ubuntu VM in $WORK data centre that has much faster bandwidth than my home – it proved to be a pain to fully remove

Geek

Ghost admin and CDN caching

I recently switched from BIND to Unbound for my home network's caching DNS server (which I should also write a post about), and in the process also simplified my local DNS to no longer have split-view versions of some of the domain names I own that have web sites hosted

Useful

New things this week - Apr 6

A few new (to me) things that came up this past week. Slack mobile now has a dark modeApache 2.4 has a "patch now" (CVSS score 8.8) local root vulnerability Magento has a "patch now" (CVSS score 9.0) remote SQL injection vulnerability Microsoft bug bounty programs have

comics

Reading Comics Tech

I've just recently finally found a good way to get through my backlog of comics in the cbz/cbr format, thought I'd share. Nothing groundbreaking, these tools have been around a few years and likely documented elsewhere, but it's working well for me now and might help someone else. Hardware

Movies

Movie Reviews - February 2019

Another year, some more movie reviews... Obligatory link to how I rate movies, and there may be spoilers. Captain America: Civil War (7/10) - It's a Marvel superheroes movie. I like Marvel superheroes. It's not the best, it's not the worst. Very obviously a bridge movie without much resolution

Podcasts

Podcasts 2019

Time for another update on podcasts! I still mourn the death of the video podcast, but I suppose it was fairly inevitable since YouTube and Twitch don't charge creators for bandwidth and also made monetizing content relatively simple. It's hard to beat that value proposition. You'll notice that a lot

Movies

Movie Reviews - November 2018

It's that time again... as always, reminder about the post on how I rate movies. And spoilers will happen. (Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash) Alien: Covenant (6/10) - As I said in the April reviews, I get Alien: Covenant and Prometheus mixed up a fair bit, especially at

Security

Disguise from the CIA

Fascinating video of a past CIA Chief of Disguise, Jonna Mendez, talking about her work. I suspect many of the specific tactics are not valid anymore – for example, many comments on the video point out that distinctive habits mentioned about Europeans are no longer valid, likely due to global spread

Movies

Movie reviews - August 2018

I've heard there're people waiting for me to write more reviews, so I guess I better get moving. Reminder, here's the post where I explain how my rating system. Let's go! Logan 8/10 - I'm a fan of both Old Man Logan and X-23 / new Wolverine from the comics,

Work

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and Chef version

tl;dr - there seems to be a bug using Chef 14 to bootstrap nodes with the current AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate, using Chef 13 works as expected. I've started working with AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate at $WORK and ran into an annoying issue yesterday with Chef 14.

Movies

Movie Reviews - July 2018

Yet another installment of movie reviews from my list on IMDB. Moving closer to current, but still almost a year back. Here's the post where I explain how I rate movies. Usual warning about spoilers... Inferno 4/10 - Based on the Dan Brown novel, part of the DaVinci Code

Work

Talent Multiplier

In a 1x1 with my manager the other day we discussed an interesting topic, which I don't think either of us had fully recognized in this way before. It seems somewhat obvious that adding a really talented person to a team can bring up the total productivity to a higher

Movies

Movie Reviews - April 2018

Next chunk of movie reviews from my list on IMDB, still working on a fairly large backlog. Here's the post where I explain how I rate movies. There Will Be Spoilers. Prometheus 6/10 - This one's a bit mixed up in my head with Alien: Covenant that I watched

Useful

CQ / AEM - reverting HTTP service config

Ran into an issue today that I couldn't quickly find a useful fix for with Google, so here it is for posterity. In the Adobe AEM (nee CQ) CMS there are configuration options for the HTTP service that can be set in /system/console/configMgr. In CQ 5.x the

Chef

Chef upgrades - part 1

At work our internal Chef infrastructure has been using an older version of Chef for a while. We built out several fully Chef-managed internal projects, all using an automated CI/CD pipeline for running Kitchen tests and pushing cookbooks out. That work's been in maintenance mode for a while, everything's

Useful

Managing Email

Over almost 30 years using email at work I've gathered a few habits to ensure that I see email as it comes in, reply quickly, and can find messages later. In the past I've had to deal with tens of thousands of emails per day, and I'm frequently asked by

Books

Books - April 2018

As mentioned in my earlier post about starting to blog book reviews... here are some book reviews! See all the notes in that previous post about how I'm doing these. The Paper Magician Trilogy by Charle N. Holmberg (2014) - 7/10 - I've read the first two of the

Books

New - Book Reviews

As mentioned in my earlier post about social media I've deleted my Goodreads account, so I'm going to start doing some quick blog posts here about any books I've read/dropped/want to read. I'll post links to the authors' sites instead of linking to Goodreads or Amazon or other

Podcasts

Podcasts 2018

I've recently dumped a bunch of podcasts I used to listen to - some because they were daily radio shows I could never keep up with but for some reason felt obligated to keep trying, others because they were just doing the same thing over and over. Here's what survived.