Shallow Thoughts : : tech

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)

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
[ 12:32 May 20, 2022    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Jerry Smith Speaks on Los Alamos Broadband at Lunch With a Leader

The March League of Women Voters' Lunch With a Leader featured Jerry Smith, the county's new Broadband Manager. I wrote it up for the LWV newsletter, but since that's PDF, I thought I'd post a more accessible copy here.

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Tags: broadband, los alamos
[ 11:12 Apr 10, 2022    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]

View or Reset All Your Firefox Zoom Settings

Firefox's zoom settings are useful. You can zoom in on a page with Ctrl-+ (actually Ctrl-+ on a US-English keyboard), or out with Ctrl--.

Useful, that is, until you start noticing that lots of pages you visit have weirdly large or small font sizes, and it turns out that Firefox is remembering a Zoom setting you used on that site half a year ago on a different monitor.

Whenever you zoom, Firefox remembers that site, and uses that zoom setting any time you go to that site forevermore (unless you zoom back out).

Now that I'm using the same laptop in different modes — sometimes plugged into a monitor, sometimes using its own screen — that has become a problem.

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Tags: web, firefox, sql, database
[ 18:04 Jan 29, 2022    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

Battling Signup Spam on the Bill Tracker

I've spent a lot of the past week battling Russian spammers on the New Mexico Bill Tracker.

The New Mexico legislature just began a special session to define the new voting districts, which happens every 10 years after the census. When new legislative sessions start, the BillTracker usually needs some hand-holding to make sure it's tracking the new session. (I've been working on code to make it notice new sessions automatically, but it's not fully working yet). So when the session started, I checked the log files...

and found them full of Russian spam.

Specifically, what was happening was that a bot was going to my new user registration page and creating new accounts where the username was a paragraph of Cyrillic spam.

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Tags: web, tech, spam, programming, python, flask, captcha
[ 18:50 Dec 12, 2021    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

Removing Bad Autocompletes from Firefox's Location Bar

A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a bar.
The bartender asks the rabbit what he'll have to drink.
"How should I know?" says the rabbit. "I'm only here because of autocomplete."

Firefox folks like to call the location bar/URL bar the "awesomebar" because of the suggestions it makes. Sometimes, those suggestions are pretty great; there are a lot of sites I don't bother to bookmark because I know they will show up as the first suggestion.

Other times, the "awesomebar" not so awesome. It gets stuck on some site I never use, and there's seemingly no way to make Firefox forget that site.

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Tags: web, firefox, sql
[ 16:54 Nov 15, 2021    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]