tutorial

From time to time, I need to clean off the contents of a hard drive on one of my Macs—most often this is the case prior to selling the mac or giving it to someone else. Instead of just formatting the drive, installing macOS, then handing it off, I want to make sure all the contents I had stored on it are irrecoverably erased (I sometimes work on projects under NDA, and I also like having some semblance of privacy in general).

Disk Utility used to expose this functionality in the UI, which made this a very simple operation. But it seems to have gone missing in recent macOS versions. Luckily, it's still available on the command line (via Terminal.app):

diskutil secureErase freespace 0 "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"

This command would write zeroes on the entire 'Macintosh HD' drive. You can see a list of all the drives connected to your Mac with ls /Volumes. There are a few other common options available (instead of 0) if you run man diskutil and scroll down to the secureErase section. I most commonly use:

I like putting stickers on my laptops, to make them a little more personal. But I hate removing the inevitable sticker residue after peeling off stickers before I sell or pass on my old laptop.

In this video, I'll show you my current best technique for getting residue off most metal and hard plastic surfaces:

Let me know if you know of any better ways that won't mar the surface or take hours!

Note: Extra special thanks to Doug Vann for providing motivation to finally post this blog post!

Early in 2016, when the Search API and Solr-related modules for Drupal 8 were in early alpha status, I wrote the blog post Set up a faceted Apache Solr search page on Drupal 8 with Search API Solr and Facets.

tl;dr: ~600 GB photo library, took ~3 weeks to migrate, some things are awesome (access to all my photos everywhere, on any device), some things less so (faces don't get synced, no loupe, no five-star rating system, no pro-level editing/batch workflows). All-in-all, I wish Apple didn't ditch Aperture... but it's not the end of the world moving to Photos.

There are many, many photographers who were disappointed Apple decided to discontinue Aperture development. Aperture was by far my favorite tool for both organizing and manipulating RAW photos taken with my DSLRs. It was fast, it had tons of great organizational features, and was highly adaptable.

Ever since I heard about the new 'Beta' Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically installs an Ubuntu LTS release inside of Windows 10 (currently 14.04), I've been meaning to give it a spin, and see if it can be a worthy replacement for Cygwin, Git shell, Cmder, etc. And what I was most interested in was whether I could finally point people to a more stable and friendly way of using Ansible on a Windows workstation.

In the past, there was the option of running Ansible inside Cygwin (and this is still the best way to try getting Ansible working in an older Windows environment), but this always felt kludgy to me, and I hated having to recommend either that or forcing Windows users to do a full Linux VM installation just to run Ansible commands. I finally updated my PC laptop to the latest Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and lo and behold, Ansible works!

I recently found a discount code through SlickDeals for $10 off the Elecrow 5" HDMI Touchscreen display for the Raspberry Pi. Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, I've wanted to try out one of these mini screens (touchscreen or no), but they've always been prohibitively expensive (usually $60+).

This screen hit the right price (even regular price is $40, which is near my 'okay for experimentation' range), and I picked it up, not knowing what to expect. I've had mixed experiences with Pi accessories from Amazon, and had never tried a product from Elecrow.

There's one thing that most first-time server administrators have in common: they have to either learn a lot about how email and spam filters work, or they offload email delivery entirely to a third party.

The latter option is often the best option, since successful email delivery is a crazy complicated endeavor. I know, because I've worked on two separate medium-volume email delivery systems in the past (over 1,000,000 emails/month, to hundreds of thousands of recipients), and for both of them, I spent likely 1,000+ hours on email delivery problems.

But for many smaller sites, non-profits, and side projects, there's no budget for a reliable 3rd party email delivery service.

Recently, I was rebuilding a personal photo sharing website (just used for myself and my family and friends), and I decided to wipe the server clean and start over with an Ansible-based configuration that I could deploy locally and to any cloud environment. For email delivery, I decided to install Exim on top of a CentOS 7 minimal base image, and I used Drupal/PHP's mail functionality to pass messages to Exim.

It's helpful to be able to enforce a minimum required Ansible version in Ansible playbooks. Ansible Roles have long been able to specify a minimum Ansible version—but only for Ansible Galaxy and ansible-galaxy-related dependency management.

I've found more and more that users who installed Ansible further in the past (in the 1.7.x or 1.8.x era) are now using some of my newer projects that require Ansible 2.0 (there are so many nice new shiny things!), and they're running into errors like:

The problem, as it turns out, is that these users are running a version < 2.0, but it's not very obvious based on that error message!

I've been using Certbot to generate and renew Let's Encrypt certificates for most of my smaller sites and services, and recently I needed to move a site from one server to another. It was easy enough to build the new server, then generate the certificate on the new server and use it in Apache or Nginx's configuration.

However, on the old server I no longer wanted to have the old certificate get renewed every week/month/etc. during the certbot-auto cron runs, so I looked to see if there was a way to simply have Certbot delete a certificate. It turns out there's not, but there is an issue—adding -delete option to remove the cert files—to add this functionality.

At this year's php[tek] conference, I decided to record my own sessions (one on a cluster of Raspberry Pis, and another on tips for successfully working from home). Over the years, I've tried a bunch of different methods of recording my own presentations, and I've settled on a pretty good method to get very clear audio and visuals, so I figured I'd document my method here in case you want to do the same.