Schneider Electric's PowerChute Network Shutdown is a piece of software which communicates with your local UPS, and initiates system shutdown if the UPS battery is unable to continue providing power. This helps to preserve file integrity in the event of a prolonged power failure.

Previously, you had to install the PCNS client separately on each virtual machine. Since then though, APC have released a PCNS VMware Appliance which is installed directly into vCenter, and initiates shutdown on all the VMware guests through a single Virtual Machine. This is a much …

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A couple months ago, Check Point revealed their discovery of the Quadrooter vulnerability affecting the Qualcomm chipsets in oodles of Android phones.

I use --CyanogenMod-- LineageOS on a Samsung Galaxy S5, so thankfully I received patches for three of the four vulnerabilities in only a few days.

However, that last vulnerability was part of a proprietary binary blob for controlling the Qualcomm LTE chipset, only patchable by Samsung themselves. It took a while for the Samsung updates to roll out, and then I got distracted for a while, but I …

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Let's Encrypt's Certbot will generate an RSA key by default. But we want to step into the new and exciting world of elliptic curve cryptography! Unfortunately Certbot doesn't really roll that way, so there are a couple hoops to jump through first.

A word of caution: this post has been written in retrospect, some time after I actually got ECDSA working. That means there are bound to be squiggly little steps that I've missed, and I certainly should have provided screenshots or snippets that I've missed. Sorry.

This post …

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This is just a brain-dump of tweaks I've made to my Pelican environment to get tidy URLs. In summary: One theme tweak, one Nginx tweak.

Making the Flex Theme drop the ugly url#slug format:

I've decided I'm going to roll with the Flex theme for a while. I like it, but it had this habit of putting anchors and slugs into my article URLs.

For example, my first page is known to Pelican as "welcome-to-the-internet". However, links to the page were automatically created as "welcome-to-the-internet#welcome-to-the-internet". It seems redundant …

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I had the urge to make a homemade alfredo the other night. I found a recipe called "Better than Olive Garden Alfredo Sauce", which is pretty descriptive, I guess. I made a couple tweaks here and there, though.

I usually stray wildly from recipies whenever I decide to follow one, but having not made an alfredo sauce before, I largely stuck to the guide. A couple changes I did make, though:

• Instead of adding the garlic and cream together, I heated the butter and fried the garlic to bring out …

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Well, I'm finally here.

I've never really run a blog before... I did write a bunch of stuff back when I ran Gravity Computing; it just was never really "bloggy". That content has now been moved to Efficient Software, but I'll probably copy my parts back over here when time permits.

I really have no intention of running a blog, but I do come across interesting and challenging problems all the time, which I'd like to share with people who are, apparently, just like you.

I've got a couple things …

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