Posts
Force a Wi-Fi Login Page to Appear
Some public wi-fi networks require you to log in to their network using a browser. This is an annoying feature of hotel wi-fi, in particular. Some browsers, like the Brave browser on Android, detect this situation and redirect you to the login page the first time you try to use the network. But the Brave browser on Linux doesn’t seeem to be able to do this, and won’t bring up the login page. The solution is to to visit the web interface of the network’s gateway router, which will then redirect to the login page.
October 9, 2023
Using Pobox.com with Postfix
As part of my plan to reduce my dependence on Big Tech, I recently made an effort to self-host an email server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is normally a really terrible idea , for a number of reasons. Receiving email is hard, but can be done with spam filters and other security tools. The much worse problem is related to sending email. As the linked article above says, it’s just too easy for your server to get on blacklists and then be blocked forever.
October 7, 2023
Installing Vaultwarden Without Docker
Update: This post describes how to install Vaultwarden on Ubuntu (or Debian) without using Docker. I now longer use this procedure, which is somewhat complicated and error-prone. Instead, I recommend installing the unofficial vaultwarden and vaultwarden-webvault packages. (I used the xUbuntu 22.04 packages.)
October 6, 2023
Postfix + Maildrop = Failure
I’ve spent most of the last two days struggling to get first chasquid (a minimalist SMTP server) and then postfix (the ubiquitious SMTP server preinstalled on my Ubuntu VPS) to work with maildrop (a mail delivery agent). The reason I was attempting to do this was so that I could have maildrop pass emails to notmuch-insert . I use notmuch as my mail store, and I thought that it would be more efficient to have notmuch-insert process emails as they come in, instead of having notmuch-new process them in a big batch.
October 3, 2023
Tagging Ogg Vorbis music files for classical music
Fifteen years ago, I started ripping my CD collection into digital form using the patent-free file formats FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. I used FLAC for the first stage of ripping, because it is lossless. But FLAC is also quite bulky, which is a problem when using the files on space-limited portable devices. So the next stage was to convert FLAC to Ogg Vorbis , which is compressed, lossy format similar to MP3, but free of patents and royalties.
August 7, 2023
Artificial Stupidity
What with all the excitement and alarm about artificial intelligence these days, I thought I would fight back with a plea for Artificial Stupidity. Specifically, I believe we can do better than the stupidity of the writing on most mainstream media by using computer-generated stupidity.
July 13, 2023
Mozart Trauma
I often joke with friends that I gave up the piano at age 13 due to Mozart Trauma. There were other factors, but this was actually the big one.
May 13, 2023
Replacing VW MK7 GTI Spark Plugs
The last cars I did serious maintenance work on were pretty ancient by today’s standards: a first generation VW Golf (‘78 Scirocco) and several Volvo 240 models. These were all very simple to work on compared to the 2016 VW GTI. When it came time to replace the spark plugs in the GTI, the job looked scary at first. The plugs are buried deep within the engine, and you have to remove the ignition coil packs to get at the plugs. Forum posts talk about the difficulty in removing the electrical connectors for the coil packs, and also removing the coil packs themselves.
May 7, 2023
La Cathédrale engloutie
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) In the comments for my post about Chopin’s Barcarolle, I mentioned Debussy’s Prelude Bk. 1 No. X, “La Cathédrale engloutie”, or “The Sunken Cathedral” in English. This Prelude is not as difficult as others in the two books of Debussy’s Preludes, and will impress your friends when you learn to play it. But there is a problem with most (all?) printed editions of this Prelude: the music seems to be asking for measures 7 to 12 and 22 to 83 to be played a half speed. This is a serious problem, because it makes those measures sound ponderously slow and out of character with the rest of the piece.
March 22, 2023
More on the Hunter Biden Emails
Earlier I described a procedure for importing the Hunter Biden emails into Notmuch , an excellent email search engine. Now that I’ve been playing around with these emails for a while, I wanted to share some random thoughts and ideas about them. Nothing I’m going to write here is a bombshell; all of the juiciest tidbits have been reported by various news sites.
March 1, 2023