PancakesCon 2 takes place Sunday, March 21, 2021. A cursory search for an ics calendar file of the talks came up empty, so I created one myself.
Linode KVM Direct Disk Boot with Syslinux and Encrypted Root Partition
ayleph on Sun 20 March 2016.I recently upgraded a Linode VPS from Xen to KVM to take advantage of touted performance boosts as well as the ability to boot directly from a disk partition of my choosing, with my preferred kernel and bootloader. I've standardized on using Syslinux on my home Arch Linux machines, so …
Continue readingI Can HA(z)Proxy Pump?
ayleph on Sun 25 January 2015.pump.io is selfish. It's intended to run on a standard web port, but it doesn't want to share that port with other services. This poses a problem to people who, like me, want to host their own pump.io server, but don't want to dedicate an entire host to …
Continue readingMigrate LUKS Passphrase to File
ayleph on Mon 23 December 2013.cryptsetup can be invoked with the -d switch to read the passphrase from a file on disk rather than from stdin. However, if you want to migrate an existing passphrase to a file, you'll probably have to take an additional step to make it actually work.
When reading input from …
Continue readingIn Pursuit of Aural Bliss
ayleph on Tue 08 October 2013.Had I been publishing articles in prior years, I undoubtedly would have mentioned my ongoing quest for a better way of enjoying my rockin' tunes. A couple of years ago, I finally replaced my over-a-decade-old Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 Digital Speakers with a pair of Yamaha HS50M studio monitors fed from …
Continue readingReprogramming the SkyDogCon 2012 Electronic Badge over FTDI
ayleph on Mon 07 October 2013.SkyDogCon 2013 is quickly approaching. This year, as in the previous two years, the organizers are making electronic badges available to attendees. And once again, badge hacking is featured as one of the conference competitions. While the focus of this competition is modifying the SDC 2013 Propeller-based badge, the …
Continue readingShmooCon IX Puzzle 6
ayleph on Thu 28 March 2013.This was my favorite of all the ShmooCon IX puzzles. It reminds me of the logic grid puzzles I used to do in elementary school. Bobby has brown hair. The person who likes green has blue eyes, etc.
Directions
The numbers next to each row and column indicate the size …
ShmooCon IX Puzzle 5
ayleph on Wed 06 March 2013.Directions
Hop from square to square in the direction of the arrow. Can jump as many squares as you like, but MUST land on an arrow of the opposite color.
The object is to get to the exit, spelling out the answer as you go.
There aren't really any good …
ShmooCon IX Puzzle 4
ayleph on Wed 06 March 2013.Collected Deckard ( )[ ][ ][ ] EX-TERM-IN-ATE [ ][ ]( )( )[ ][ ] Ripley's Ship [ ][ ][ ]( )[ ][ ][ ][ ] Became self-aware in 1997 [ ][ ]( )[ ][ ]( ) Directed 2001 [ ][ ][ ]( )( )[ ][ ] Brown's Capacitor [ ][ ]( )[ ] Father of the clones ( )[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
Directions
Using the tiles below, build the words indicated by the hints above. Use each tile only once,
Then copy the letters in circles to the circles below.
Last, decode the final answer …
Quick Tips for Future Reference
ayleph on Mon 04 March 2013.It's been a busy night fixing various bugs on the thisshitistemp.com server. Here's a collection of useful information for future reference.
smtpd_tls_security_level
Don't force Postfix stmpd encryption if you want other mail servers to be able to talk to you. Use
smtpd_tls_security_level = may # allow incoming encryption
instead of
smtpd_tls_security_level …