Apple’s latest OS X version, v10.11 “El Capitan”, comes with a new security feature protecting core system files called “System Integrity Protection” (SIP). All sounds good in theory, but software that uses, or expects files to be in, the core system directories, like /usr/lib, can run in to permission issues.
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Airport Utility under Ubuntu 14
Looking for a way to manage your Apple Airport Express under Ubuntu? There are two ways, but the only decent option is to run Apple’s Airport Utility under Wine.
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A look at hosting of Irish Web Awards 2014 Winner
Oct 23rd, 2014 2:47 pm
A few years ago I looked at the winners of the Irish Blog Awards to see where the winners were hosted [here]. I decided to do the same for this year’s Irish Web Awards.
WordPress (the open-source blogging software, rather than the blog hosting service) was still the predominant choice of software used by the winners, illustrating its common use, today, as a content management platform, and not just blogging software. Blacknight still remain strong as a choice of hosting provider, although this year’s web award winners are spread across a lot more hosters/services than the blog awards six years ago.
Here’s a quick infographic with key stats (click for full size). I’ve put the source data up on a Google Sheet for the data nerds.
Seek forward/backward plugin for Rhythmbox
If you use Rhythmbox media player (which is the default in recent Ubuntu / Debian Gnome releases), you might have expected the ability to seek backwards/forwards within the current track. Just about every other media player I’ve used has this ability to skip forward, say, 10 seconds. Not so with an out-of-the-box Rhythmbox.
Here’s a plugin to rectify that. Using keyboard shortcuts <Ctrl> + Left and <Ctrl> + Right (or the associated menu items under the “Control” menu), you can now do just that.
The plugin will seek forward by 10 seconds, and seek backwards by 5 seconds (which is based on my personal media player & DVR usage patterns).
Feel free to contribute, fork, submit pull requests, etc., over on the project page on GitHub. You can report any issues there, too.
Finally, the plugin has no installer, but you’ll find easy install instructions on the project page, as well.
Download / Docs
Manually generating salted & hashed WordPress passwords
Jan 23rd, 2013 4:08 pm
Sometimes you might need to dip in to the WordPress SQL database to manually manipulate passwords. Whether resetting a long-lost password, or adding a new user from the MySQL command line, better security in recent versions of WordPress have made this a bit of a chore.
