I Heart Ryan - Howto

TextSecure

ryan — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:44:03 +0000

Let's talk about SMS for a minute: We all know that communication is completely insecure and that telcos routinely hand over all data to the government without even waiting for them to ask. So text messaging is compromised. What can we do?

A partial answer is to send encrypted text messages. The government still knows who you're messaging, and when, but they won't get the contents of the messages.

Firefox Sync Server

ryan — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:22:23 +0000

Today I set up a Firefox Sync server.

I use Firefox on my computer at work and at home. I wish that there was a way to synchronize my browsing history and tabs and whatnot.

Well, it turns out there is. If you go to the Tools menu, you can set up sync.

But I was like "Dude there's no way I'm going to do that. I don't want my private data living up on some server for anyone to see."

Well, it turns out that:
1) The data is encrypted before it's sent to the server, but more importantly:
2) You can set up your own server!

Updating diaspora

ryan — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 08:04:02 +0000

Okay, I just updated my Diaspora server to the latest code. It's got some fancy updates like a "like" button.

I just wanted to make a quick note on updating it. This probably applies to any Rails app that uses Jammit.

After updating the code, make sure to delete the precompiled javascript and css files. Otherwise, you'll be running the new templates with the old css/js, and things will break.

Vim modelines

ryan — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:35:20 +0000

I edit a few different types of files with a few different indentation styles. Now, my favorite text editor is vim, and that supports using a config file to set your indentation style, but since I use a few of them, one config file won't work for me. Now, I'm sure you could also set a different style per filetype -- for example, python indents two spaces, C uses tabs displayed as four spaces. But that doesn't work, because different projects sometimes choose different styles, even though they use the same type of file.

Unattended DVD Ripping

ryan — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 02:26:33 +0000

I recently purchased a large number of movies from a very cool video store which was closing. It was a terrible disaster. Sure, I got a bunch of DVDs from it. But I did not gain access to any new movies -- I could have rented all these any time I wanted. Instead, the amazing collection in the possession of the video store is now split up in the hands of a bunch of individuals like me. It is not a collection anymore, and is far, far less useful to the community.

It's All Text!

ryan — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:30:27 +0000

One of my favorite Firefox extensions these days is It's All Text!. This extension lets you use alternative text editors to edit the text in text boxes.

Now, big wimps like to edit their text in WYSIWYG editors. Not me. I like to use vim.

Okay, so "It's All Text!" allows us to give a command line to start a text editor. What command do we give to start vim?

Fun with acpid

ryan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:47:29 +0000

It doesn't seem glamorous, but it is indeed possible to have fun with acpid. acpid is a daemon that sits and listens for acpi events from the kernel. When it gets an event, it fires the rules you have configured.

Okay, so what's the use?

Drupal intra-linking problems solved

ryan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:26:42 +0000

Sometimes, when using Drupal, I find that I want to link to some of my older posts. However, I often have a couple of development checkouts of my site. Consider the case where I have the live site, which can be reached at http://iheartryan.com/, and I have a development checkout, http://localhost/iheartryan/. Now, say I'm trying to link to my Rhythmbox Playlist Folders post. How should I make this link? I have a couple choices:

http://iheartryan.com/post/rhythmbox-playlist-folders
/post/rhythmbox-playlist-folders

utf8 lessons

ryan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:58:04 +0000

The other day, I was working on a Drupal site. I based the theme for the site on the Zen theme (ver 1.1).

I was experiencing a very strange problem: I could not save any of the changes I made on the theme configuration page. I tried to change the logo. I tried to make it display the slogan. Nothing worked.

Firefox SSL Indication

ryan — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:27:00 +0000

Firefox 3 is, in several ways an improvement over Firefox 2. But there are just a few things that drive me crazy. One of them is the way it handles the display of sites using SSL.