Discourse is a popular forum tool available as a self-hosted open-source tool. It can be installed bare-metal on Linux, but the Docker installation is one that I found most interesting. Unlike most Docker-implemented tools, Discourse has a script that runs outside of the docker containers (on your base machine) to set up the tool. This monolithic script (./discourse-setup) seems to do many of the things that docker-compose does, but obviously worse. I’m no fan of doing things this way; especially when the base alternative is nowhere on their site. My challenge this time was to build a basic docker-compose.yml that would get Discourse running in a test environment. Here’s what I did.
Docker has been an amazing tool for deploying applications fast, but as I have come to need containers that interacted with each other, the networking aspects have brought some major challenges. I wasn’t a fan of docker’s documentation either. It doesn’t explain the nuances of this process. Namely, I wanted to know how to bring up a container and right from the start assign an IP address. Let me show you how that’s done.
If you use Unifi gear, you know that it can proliferate quite fast. Couple that with cameras, a second network for cameras, and you have a growing need for more Unifi controllers to manage devices. The best approach is to, uhm, unifi controllers into a cloud-based setup – but you can’t always do that. When controllers get isolated on networks, you may find that you’ve lost the administrator password for one. Here’s how you can reset it so long as you have root shell access to the machine running your controller.
Let me reflect on this, I thought. That seemed like the most important thing I could do after reading Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. Both a memoir and a book of advice, McConaughey is clear in his book not to call it ‘self-help.’ The titular greenlights being a metaphor for life’s moments that work. How every red light is bound to turn green eventually. It’s a cool and clever idea. I like it.
Hello reader. You might have noticed some changes. After more than eight years, I’ve decided to change this site’s theme. The site will be using a slightly modified version of the Engitech theme. In time, I’ll dig deeper and change this that feels appropriate to my use. The base theme was good enough to start with (and I love the maintenance mode options), so I bought it. Pay for the stuff you like!
The UNVR-4 appears to be designed to evade any sense that it was built for business. Let me take you into the issues I encountered while setting up. Given a robust product, these issues would have been uncovered and I’d have moved on to the next thing. But, because of Unifi’s extremely minimalist design, getting at details was difficult.
News that M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Old would be inspired by the French graphic novel Sandcastle had me very interested in the source material. What was it about this story that gripped Shyamalan so much that he wanted to option it and make a movie? I had to read it now.
Given the election season of 2020, I wanted to dive deeper into the divisions that have stricken the U.S. I thought this book might shed some light on issues of the day. A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead, Nancy L. Rosenblum felt like the right book for today’s wild political climate.
You might remember the recent sunsetting of Google’s URL shortener. This was something I took notice of because it meant that the url.cwl.cc service (based on their link shortener) was going to be shut down. Right? To be fair, I took notice, but also didn’t do much at the time. March 30, 2019, came and went and I could still use the service. 2020 arrived, and the service was still functioning. Now, more than a year and a half past the end, I can still create short links. This is perhaps the biggest oddity I have ever seen from Google.
With recent news exploding with talk about a possible Tom Hardy Bond casting and, well, this being the year (hopefully) another James Bond movie is released; I decided to dig into some lore around the character. In the process, I came across The Real James Bond: A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue, and Ian Fleming. This book doesn’t cover much about secret agent James Bond, Ian Fleming or much identity theft for that matter. This is primarily about the man whose name was lifted from a book cover to (somewhat randomly) name the world’s most popular Mi6 agent.