Software – FoolControl – Phear the penguin

google-podcasts-desktop app – Listen to Google Podcasts on your desktop!

May 4, 2019

Please note: in meantime Google has rolled out changes to their backend which make this tool redundant. Now, Google Podcasts URL’s shared via its Android App are automatically redirected to their web counterpart when run on desktop.

In the sea of podcast apps, I’ve settled for one that’s only available as an Android App.

Since all my music is there, my first option was Spotify, but unfortunately it doesn’t have some of my favorite Podcasts, such as The Joe Rogan Experience or Cyber – Motherboard (Vice) and etc … Pocket Casts seemed to have everything I wanted, but I didn’t want to pay for it, regardless of how little it cost.

So that’s how I ended up with Google Podcasts, which had everything I wanted except the desktop app. Which would normally be a deal breaker, but it wasn’t since there was a hack to get it working on desktop.

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vim-hue: colorful Vim config for all your SRE/DevOps needs

February 27, 2019

I can’t say I’ve been using Vim from my early Linux days in 1999. In those days I found Vim to be a bit … overwhelming. Not easy to navigate, or configure, not to mention quitting it. So I just stuck with pico or today’s nano and various other IDE’s (see if you recognize any of maintainers names).

However, once I did discover everything Vim was capable of, from that day onwards Vim has been my default editor. Hence, for last decade my Vim configuration has only been growing which I would copy over on a new workstations as part of my dotfile backups.

I wanted to stop process of deploying my Vim configuration by simply copying over configuration. Also since configuring Vim to this day can still be cumbersome and is prone to errors. I’ve decided to create an installer which will seamlessly setup Vim with configuration I need for my workload.

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Automagically deploy & run containerized WordPress (PHP7 FPM, Nginx, MariaDB) using Ansible + Docker on AWS

May 21, 2017

Update: containerized-wordpress-project comes with enabled HTTPS site encryption using Let’s Encrypt certificates.

In this blog post, I’ve described what started as simple migration of WordPress blog to AWS, ended up as automation project consisting of publishing multiple Ansible roles deploying and running multiple Docker images.

If you’re not interested in reading about my entire journey, cognition gains and how this process came to be, please skim down to “Birth of: containerized-wordpress-project (TL;DR)” section.

Migrating WordPress blog to AWS (EC2, Lightsail?)

Since I’ve been sold on Amazon’s AWS idea of cloud computing “services” for couple of years now. I’ve wanted, and been trying to migrate this (WordPress) blog to AWS, but somehow it never worked out.

Moving it to EC2 instance, with its own ELB volumes, AMI, EIP, Security Group … it just seemed as an overkill.

When AWS Lightsail was first released, it seemed that was an answer to all my problems.

But it wasn’t, disregarding its bit restrictive/dumbed down versions of original features. Living in Amsterdam, my main problem with it was that it was only available in a single US region.

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Kernel agnostic, DisplayLink Debian GNU/Linux driver installer (Debian/Ubuntu/Elementary)

November 29, 2015

I use DisplayLink at work for multi display setup/Ethernet/etc, all by connecting to a single USB port. Although it’s a nifty little device, its software support isn’t that great.

Only Linux driver they have is for Ubuntu. Which is only optimized to work with 14.04, and latest kernel they support is 3.19!

Their installer script can be modified to work with Debian and Systemd, but even so if you’re using any Linux kernel version other then >=3.14 && <=3.19 you’re not going to have a good time.

displaylink-debian (github)

That’s why I decided to take things in my own hands, and created displaylink-debian.

Tool which allows you to seamlessly install and uninstall DisplayLink drivers on Debian/Ubuntu based Linux distributions.

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Juniper/Pulse Secure VPN on Linux (2015 edition)

September 21, 2015

Prelude

Some time ago, Juniper Networks sold their beloved Junos Pulse SSL VPN, and thus new company called Pulse Secure was created. Which resulted in Pulse Secure client, which is used to establish secure authentication to the (VPN) tunnel.

Since Juniper never supported Linux, it comes as no surprise that successor company client supports every other platform except Linux.

Setting Juniper VPN/Secure Pulse on Linux is pain. Basically, it comes down to using Java applet in web browser or using 3rd party hacks and scripts. Something I refused to accept.

Getting it to work in a web browser

Although, it can be bit confusing on 64 bit architecture, getting VPN access via web browser is simple. You just need to install right packages:

sudo apt-get install icedtea-7-plugin openjdk-7-jre:i386 libstdc++6:i386 lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 libxext6:i386 libxrender1:i386 libxtst6:i386 libxi6:i386

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FoolControl – Phear the penguin

Category: Software

Migrating WordPress blog to AWS (EC2, Lightsail?)