Shallow Thoughts : : tech

Apache has decided websites shouldn't have their own /javascript

Someone sent me an alert that my Galilean Jupiter's moons simulation and SatSat Saturn's moons simulation pages weren't working.

Sure enough, they weren't. The error console said Loading failed for the script with the name of a calendar widget I use, along with the CSS it uses, both loaded from a directory inside /javascript on my website, the same website where the moon simulations are running.

I checked the logs: sure enough, references to those files were returning 404 in the access log, with nothing at all in the error log. The files were clearly there, and world readable, so it wasn't a permissions problem.

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Tags: apache, debian, linux, tech, web
[ 13:29 Sep 27, 2025    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

How Many Searches Do You Do in a Month?

Michael Kennedy asked whether people are using search engines less because of AI chatbots.

I haven't really gotten into using AI chatbots as coding assistants, so I'm not one to say. But it did make me wonder how many searches I do. Michael saw a stat that people average fewer than 300 searches per month; he thought that was absurdly low until he checked his own stats and found he'd only made 211 searches so far in March. (Of course, March isn't over yet. He didn't give a search number for a complete month.)

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Tags: tech, firefox, web, python, google, sqlite
[ 16:07 Mar 26, 2025    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]

Gmail with an App Password

In 2022 I wrote about Sending Mail via Gmail using OAuth2.

But it turned out that Google expires OAuth2 tokens on a weekly basis. So if you use that method, once a week you'll have to bring up a browser, log in to your Google account and go through the five or so pages of re-authorizing. Which will invariably happen when you're in a hurry and just wanted to send a quick email so you can move on to other things.

However, it turns out there's an easier way, which apparently doesn't expire: App passwords. I switched to using app passwords back then (I've been using that app password since then), and I even wrote it up, and then forgot to post it. What a dingbat!

But I changed my GMail password recently, and it turns out when you change your Gmail account password, Google revokes all app passwords you've set up (and, of course, doesn't bother to tell you that, and the error message you get when you try to sign in with the old app password has nothing whatever to do with the actual problem, which is that your app password has been revoked and you need to create a new one).

So I dug out this old never-got-posted article and used it to make a new app password, and have updated the parts that were a little out of date.

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Tags: email, mutt, gmail
[ 20:32 Mar 29, 2024    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Recoding America: a Book Review

I don't write a lot of book reviews here, but I just finished a book I'm enthusiastic about: Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, by Jennifer Pahlka.

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Tags: books, programming, tech
[ 19:20 Jul 27, 2023    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]

I'm Glad I Don't Run Wordpress

Last week I spent some time monitoring my apache error logs to try to get rid of warnings from my website and see if there are any errors I need to fix. (Answer: yes, there were a few things I needed to fix, mostly due to changes in libraries since I wrote the pages in question.)

The vast majority of lines in my error log, however, are requests for /wp-login.php or /xmlrpc.php. There are so many of them that they drown out any actual errors on the website.

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Tags: web, apache
[ 10:28 Apr 13, 2023    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

Exploring your Search History in Firefox

I wanted to find something I'd googled for recently. That should be easy, right? Just go to the browser's history window.

Well, actually not so much. You can see them in Firefox's history window, but they're interspersed with all the other places you've surfed so it's hard to skim the list quickly.

I decided to take a little time and figure out how to extract the search terms. I was pretty sure that they were in places.sqlite3 inside the firefox profile. And they were.

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Tags: web, firefox, google, sqlite
[ 16:54 Jan 10, 2023    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

View Mail Attachments from Mutt

Back in 2015, I wrote a script for the mutt mailer (or any plaintext mail program, really) to view MS Word documents (or other unfriendly formats) attached to emails. (This is unfortunately something that comes up constantly in email exchanges with League of Women Voters people —

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Tags: email, mutt, programming, python, linux
[ 18:52 Dec 18, 2022    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Sending Mail via Gmail using OAuth2 (2022 Edition)

Update: Google's OAuth2 turns out to be not a good way to send mail, because passwords have to be renewed weekly. So you probably want to use a GMail App Password instead. I'm leaving this article up in case there's some reason someone would actually want to use OAuth2 with GMail.

There's been lots of talk on mailing lists for various mail programs, like Alpine and Mutt, about Google's impending dropping of password access.

Although my regular email address is on a Linux server, I subscribe to several Google Groups. I use a gmail address for those, because Google Groups doesn't work well with non-gmail addresses (you can't view the archives or temporarily turn off mail, and unsubscribing may or may not work depending on the phase of the moon).

I prefer not to have to sign on to Google and use the clunky browser interface when I have a perfectly good mailer (I use mutt) on my computer. I send mail from mutt using a program called msmtp. But to post to a Google Group, I need to use Google's SMTP server. (SMTP is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the way mail gets from one computer to another across the internet.)

Up to now, I've been using an msmtp configuration that includes my Gmail password. That requires clicking through several Gmail pages to enable the "Less Secure Apps" setting. Google resets that preference every month or so and I have to go find the "Less Secure Apps" page to click through the screens again; but aside from that, it works okay.

But now Google has announced they'll be removing support for password access on May 30, 2022.

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Tags: email, mutt, gmail, oauth
[ 00:00 May 20, 2022    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]