Diversions | Branden R. Williams, Business Security Specialist

A Nerdy Quest, Puzzle Wednesday! standard

When I was a traveling consultant, one of my favorite little games was grabbing the USA Today puzzle section from the Admirals Club and trying to finish the Sudoku before the wheels of the jet left the ground. I got better over time, though I still didn’t finish it before every takeoff. Eventually, I added crossword puzzles to the mix, largely due to the influence of my friend James. I watched him work through them and wanted to learn the tricks myself. On Sundays—usually parked on the couch watching NFL games—I’d have the Sunday crossword nearby (mostly unfilled). But week by week, I improved. One unexpected perk of getting the Sunday paper delivered (at least on our route) is that ...

pgMail 1.5 Released! standard

Well, it’s pretty rare that I get anyone talking about my old PostgreSQL email stored procedure, but here we are. I wrote this thing almost 25 years ago to essentially replicate the functionality of xp_sendmail into PostgreSQL. I released it to the world, because I knew other people would have this issue. And as it turned out, they absolutely do. Thus, pgMail was born. The history is all on Github now, and it’s generally been stable over the years. There were some bugs that needed to get fixed over time such as issues with SMTP Pipelining, adding support for MIME Multipart emails that would offer HTML formats as are the norm these days. But today I had someone request to ...

Let’s Encrypt for non-webservers standard

Let’s say you want to use Let’s Encrypt for something that isn’t a website. So you download certbot, you get things going with your manual cert, and you realize that when it goes to rotate you will need to restart some services. When you go look through the docs, it’s not very clear on how to do this exactly. So here’s my post to remind myself what I did (and if it helps you as well, then hooray!). What you want to do is configure a hook. They come in three varieties: pre-hooks (commands to run prior to running the re-issue), deploy-hooks (commands to run immediately after the cert is issued but prior to deployment), and post-hooks (commands to be ...

When Man Pages Go Weird standard

You may not realize that I got my start in the technology world in the early 1990s learning Unix. From my first Netcom account to my high school allowing me, A JUNIOR, to have and run a Slackware machine directly connected to the Internet. My first Linux kernel was a 1.2.8 kernel, and I vividly remember someone trolling me on IRC to fix some strange problem the best bet was to rm -rf /* as root. He got me good. Working through *nix in those days was made easier (and still is today) through Manual Pages, or manpages for short. It’s the thing that people would expect you to go do when they replied “RTFM” when you asked a question ...

Aviation Apps I Use standard

A friend of mine suggested this as a blog post, the top aviation apps that I use on my phone. Now, keep in mind, I’m a pilot. So some of the apps I use, such as ForeFlight, wouldn’t make much sense unless you are a pilot (or have had some kind of pilot training). I’m not including pricing on these simply because they could change, but some have both a free and paid tier. Another disclaimer, the links below are to the iOS versions. Most of these are also available in the Google Play store, so you can search there to find them if you are on Android. So, here’s the list! FlightRadar24: Ever wonder which plane just rattled the ...

Sellers Buying 5-Star Amazon Reviews standard

tl;dr: A seller who sold a terrible product is offering me $50 to change my review from 2 stars to 4 or 5. November 1 Update: The product has been removed and I can’t find the seller’s store anymore. March 9 Update: Updated review is live that talks about the $50 offer. I’m not even sure where to start with this one. It’s a scenario that I’ve never experienced before even as one of the earliest of early adopters of Amazon (like, when they only sold books and this Unix nerd was deep into the O’Reilly series). I shop on Amazon for the convenience. They don’t always have the best selection or price, so I still shop around. In some ...

Introducing Where To Now standard

When I want to learn a new programming language, my typical method of doing this is to either take an existing small project and port it over to the new language, or come up with a small, yet practical problem to solve. I’m kinda like Johnny Five, in that I need input! I’ve been playing with Go for a little bit, but nothing very serious. I’ve also been playing around with Docker and Kubernetes, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone by building an application in Go as well as learning how to package it up in a Docker container. Introducing Where To Now. It’s designed to vary the webpage that might show up when a user ...

Brando’s Rules for Success standard

I’ve had a few folks ask me if I could attribute any big life lessons that have helped me get to where I am. Things like the Golden Rule or an extremely healthy amount of respect for karma (both of which would be true for me) came to mind, but I was able to distill my guiding principles into this: Show up. Don’t be a dick. End of list. Let’s dive deeper. Show up. This rule can mean a lot of things, which is why I love it. It’s extremely versatile. Be physically present and on time to appointments when required. Don’t be a flake. Fulfill your commitments (and communicate EARLY if you need to adjust them, bad news does ...

So You Want to Gong-Fu? standard

The Gong-fu Tea Ceremony is a celebrated method for brewing and enjoying tea (here’s another instructional video, and here are two posts with awesome info). When you start to spend money on higher quality leaf, the gong-fu tea ceremony will yield better results for a more immersive and enjoyable tea experience. Even lower quality tea can taste much better using the gong-fu method! Full disclosure: I’m just as lazy as the next guy some days. There are times where I can barely be bothered to rip open a single serve teabag of Queen Anne and throw it into a mug with hot water. I also have a few different ways I make loose leaf tea that are simple and get ...

Updated Tea Journey post standard

It’s been over a year since I blogged about my tea journey so far, and a LOT has happened in the past year. I’ve learned so much more and expanded my tea tastes substantially. I hope that my crazy love for tea rubs off on you guys and you can enjoy some with me! Go check out the update here!

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