There has been a lot of talk about website comments on Bubbles. I think it started with a post by Forking Mad, and a bunch of replies are linked at the bottom of that page. My blog posts have had a "Reply by e-mail" button for years. Some of them also link to other places where you can comment. This has been a nice...

My first watch was a Swiss analog watch from an unknown brand1. It was given to me by my parents and had a Hilti logo on it. They most likely got it for free when they bought something. By the time it finally broke, smartphones were gaining popularity. I was using an LG Cookie (and later an iPhone 3G) at that time....

The last few years, web traffic from bots has increased rapidly. Some sources1 claim that automated activity now accounts for over half of all web traffic. This is even more pronounced on small websites like mine, as I don't receive many human visitors. The table below shows traffic on this website for the last few...

My backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 backup rule: Three copies of your data On two different media One copy off-site Some people argue that your production data (the copy stored on your laptop, for example) counts as one of those copies. I disagree. While it may be a copy of your current data, it's not a copy of...

SQLite does not have built-in UUID functions, but by getting creative with the randomblob(N) function we can generate version 4 (random) UUIDs. Before we continue, it's important to note that you should verify whether SQLite's random functions are adequate for your usecase. They may not return truly random data....

Today, I worked on a ticket for a customer with a Craft 4.x CMS that created a MySQL table with a staggering 270 columns. Most of them were of type TEXT, but it also contained about 50 VARCHAR columns of varying lengths. Attempting to import the table resulted in a Row Size Too Large error. ERROR 1118 (42000): Row...

Customers regularly send me x509 key pairs at work1. Most of the time these have been forwarded a few times already, and people tend to mess up the files. This means that the public and private keys don't match anymore, and I have to ask for a new pair. Luckily, we can use OpenSSL to check whether a public and...

Kev Quirk recently wrote about removing content from public blogs: Generally speaking, I don't delete content from this site. Having said that, if I posted something that I later feel is particularly egregious, I think I probably would. I personally don't think that a website should be a permanent record - how can...

Command-line tool pwgen is a well known tool to generate a list of passwords. I use it almost daily: when creating new accounts on remote servers, or when I want to encrypt sensitive data with a temporary password to send to a customer. Sometimes opening my terminal and typing pwgen 30 1 is faster than getting to...

Recently, I was looking for an outside temperature sensor. Preferably in an instrument shelter, as my whole garden has direct sunlight during most of the day. I ended up buying the Alecto WS-5500, which is actually a rebranded Fine Offset WH2900. It has a decent temperature sensor and also supports uploading data to...

Due to the special characters used in json, the easiest way to use jq with inline scripts it by putting it between single quotes. That makes it impossible to use bash variables inside your script. Fortunately, jq has an --arg parameter to create a predefined variable from an external source. You can use it to define...

Over the past few months I've been working on a new stylesheet for this website, and today I finally pushed the redesign branch to production! The previous CSS code was largely written almost 10 years ago and only received small updates and enhancements. Since then, new features like flexbox and grids were added and...