Last weekend I wanted to check in again on my Freenode IRC account. I logged into my trusted irssi IRC client and was confronted with these errors:
21:01 [freenode] !*.freenode.net *** You must use TLS/SSL and authenticate via SASL to connect to freenode please visit https://irc.com/login/sso in order to create an account. SASL Configuration: https://freenode.net/kb/answer/sasl - Webchat: https://webchat.freenode.net/ 21:01 [freenode] -!- Capabilities requested: multi-prefix 21:01 [freenode] -!- Capabilities supported: account-notify account-tag away-notify batch cap-notify chghost draft/relaymsg echo-message extended-join inspircd.
One of my servers went belly-up. It is always unfortunate when you are confronted with a failing server. If you ever get messages like this, the hard disk on which your Operating System is installed, is probably K.I.A.. In the end I did a hard reset and was greeted with busybox (which was expected). Just wanted to share the kind of ‘weird’ messages you can see when you have I/O errors due to a failing drive (in this case it was a USB stick, not a HDD or SSD).
Recently I upgraded to my new, freedom-loving, pro-privacy Internet Service Provider Freedom Internet. I was already running a mailserver before I switched: postfix. For years I had no issues sending out e-mails towards other mailservers. After I upgraded though, it seemed I was unable to send e-mail to Microsoft e-mail addresses. I noticed it only after a few months, when I tried to reach someone with an @live.nl e-mail address.
My main system is currently running Ubuntu 21.04. For e-mail I’m relying on neomutt together with offlineimap, which both are amazing tools. Recently offlineimap was updated/moved to offlineimap3. Looking on my system, offlineimap reports itself as OfflineIMAP 7.3.0 and dpkg tells me it is version 0.0~git20210218.76c7a72+dfsg-1.
Unicode Decode Error problem Today I noticed several errors in my offlineimap sync log. Basically the errors looked like this:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 1299: invalid start byte UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xeb in position 1405: invalid continuation byte Solution If you encounter it as well (and you use mutt or neomutt), please have a look at this great comment on Github from Joseph Ishac (jishac) since his tip solved the issue for me.
A while ago I “discovered” the Linus Tech Tips channel on youtube. Last week I wanted to reference a specific part of a video to a friend and really needed to put some effort into it to find it again (the correct video and then the correct time in that video). So why not ‘document’ it here…
The video I was looking for was the She should’ve studied - ROG RIG Reboot 2020 at about 12:26.
archive.org has good newsletter and the newest edition contained a link to the video of their Game Not Over - virtual event, which I really recommend to watch.
They have a fun and interesting chat with John Carmack after which they have a panel discussion. Topics which are touched in the first 30 minutes: open source, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and “Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution”.
P.S. Please consider donating to the Internet Archive and Wikipedia.
Recently I came into the possession of a HP Microserver (from 2012) type N40L (not the N54L unfortunately). Fandom as a nice overview of the specifications (as well as tips etc.). This server came with a Remote Access Card which is a somewhat simpler version of HP’s ILO (which is basically IPMI). Looking for documentation on the web for a system which is almost a decade old is, well, challenging. Search results will not be plentiful and those who seem to be useful, could turn out to contain dead links etc.
TL;DR: Android has a secret which, apparently, is still not well known. It is… the ‘skip’ button, because you do not need a Google account to use your Android smartphone.
Recently my wife switched over to a new mobile phone ( Fairphone ). During the setup, I showed her the ‘skip’ button. With that, you can skip the Google registration of your phone (which most people believe is mandatory, but is actually optional).
As some of you might know, I have a tendency to be an archivist sometimes. This makes me appreciate the online resources we have (and often are not well known), such as the internet archive or the wayback machine. Luckily there are more archivists online, for example the archive team and likeminded people at DataHoarder (reddit). And apparently there is also a awesome web archiving list. anarcat also has a good post about Website mirroring and archival.
For my job I am required to use Microsoft Teams. Preferbly I use it on a Linux desktop using the deb or snap packages (it is great that those are provided). However there are some issues which you should be aware of.
Meeting URLs not working TL;DR if you want to be able to join Microsoft Teams meetings using a URL, you should stick with the older 1.3.00.30857 version and not update to the newer 1.