Archive for the ‘howto’ Category

While I wait for GitHub to get their act together on my Dependabot Wishlist I’ve created a little script for my first frustration – rollups. Another morning, another patch release of Dart, another 4 Dependabot PRs in my inbox: Only this time I was able to simply run: and the subsequent 3 PRs were rolled […]


Background At home I have a bunch of SSH tunnels from a VM to my various virtual private servers in various places around the world, so I can direct my web traffic through those exit points when needed. I’ve written before about using autossh to do this. But when I’m travelling I don’t have my […]


TL;DR Using SSH keys is already a big part of the git/GitHub experience, and now they can be used for signing commits, which saves having to deal with GPG keys. Background For a while I’ve been signing my git commits with a GPG key (at least on my primary desktop), and GitHub has some nice […]


I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to manage labels. But nothing that seemed easy enough. So… I pulled together my […]


The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which has made it quite a journey […]


Background Earlier in the year I wrote about upgrading from my old DS411j to a new DS420j, and how simple the upgrade process was. But I knew there would be trouble ahead, as Synology doesn’t provide a way to upgrade volumes created on its 32bit systems past 16TB. Last weekend one of my HGST 4TB […]


TL;DR Replace layouts/index.html with layouts/_default/single.html in your chosen theme. The home page for the site will be created from content/_index.md and additional pages can be created at content/pagename/index.md (NB no _ before index that time). Background $daughter0 has offered to build web sites for some friends and family members, which means she’s learning various aspects […]


Saturday was very rainy, so I thought I’d finally get around to upgrading my home lab from ESXi 5.5 to 6.5. I started with my #2 Gen 8 Microserver as I don’t have any live VMs on it, and thus began many wasted hours of reboot after reboot failing to get anything to work. Slow […]


I like to have permanent SSH connections from (a VM on) my home network to the various virtual private servers (VPSs) that I have scattered around the globe as these give me SOCKS proxies that I can use to make my web traffic appear from the US or the Netherlands or wherever (as mentioned in […]


TL;DR Getting a Midas Plus squirting properly again is very easy once you learn the secret of removing and cleaning the thermostatic cartridge. A simple procedure due to some great design, but one that isn’t documented anywhere that I could find. Background In just over a year since I had a new shower fitted as […]