My backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 backup rule: Three copies of your data On two different media One copy off-site Some people argue that your production data (the copy stored on your laptop, for example) counts as one of those copies....

SQLite does not have built-in UUID functions, but by getting creative with the randomblob(N) function we can generate version 4 (random) UUIDs. Before we continue, it's important to note that you should verify whether SQLite's random...

Today, I worked on a ticket for a customer with a Craft 4.x CMS that created a MySQL table with a staggering 270 columns. Most of them were of type TEXT, but it also contained about 50 VARCHAR columns of varying lengths. Attempting to...

Customers regularly send me x509 key pairs at work1. Most of the time these have been forwarded a few times already, and people tend to mess up the files. This means that the public and private keys don't match anymore, and I have to ask...

Kev Quirk recently wrote about removing content from public blogs: Generally speaking, I don't delete content from this site. Having said that, if I posted something that I later feel is particularly egregious, I think I probably would....

Command-line tool pwgen is a well known tool to generate a list of passwords. I use it almost daily: when creating new accounts on remote servers, or when I want to encrypt sensitive data with a temporary password to send to a customer....

Recently, I was looking for an outside temperature sensor. Preferably in an instrument shelter, as my whole garden has direct sunlight during most of the day. I ended up buying the Alecto WS-5500, which is actually a rebranded Fine...

Due to the special characters used in json, the easiest way to use jq with inline scripts it by putting it between single quotes. That makes it impossible to use bash variables inside your script. Fortunately, jq has an --arg parameter...

Over the past few months I've been working on a new stylesheet for this website, and today I finally pushed the redesign branch to production! The previous CSS code was largely written almost 10 years ago and only received small updates...

While most certificate vendors provide certificates in both PFX format and PEM, most customers seem to send me their certificate in PFX format. Maybe because that way the private key is usually encrypted, or maybe they're used to that...