Articles 11 to 20
I am currently working at IKEA IT and with the recent death of IKEA founder – Ingvar Kamprad – a number of stories about his accomplishments are being shared. You can find some examples in the sources section of this article for inspiration. This article is however not so much about the entrepreneurial legacy that Ingvar has left behind as about some of the things he has not done.
It has been a while now that this website is static (meaning that it is just a collection of HTML pages with some CSS and Javascript). Despite the limited needs of a static website, I have never taken the time to move away from the hosting solution that I was using back in the days when the website was built upon Drupal (relying on PHP and MySQL). The website being originally hosted on a managed VPS, this was becoming a quite expensive solution to maintain and since a new year had just started, it was a good time to finally take the resolution to find a cheaper solution. Let’s take a look at some of the options available nowadays to host static websites.
There hasn’t been much activities on the site for the past couple of years but I hope that 2018 will change that! It’s been a while that it was on the todo list so the first update of the year will bring better code highlighting with line numbering.
While I thought it would be a few minutes work, it turned out to be a little bit more complicated than that. nanoc offers syntax highlighting out of the box, and this is what I had originally in place on the site. However, despite trying a number of different options, I had issues activating the line numbering when using rouge. The solution was to add the relevant parameters to kramdown instead.
Raspbian is a Linux distribution based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi. It offers a user friendly interface for the tiny hardware but does not come with all the advanced features that you might be used to on a complete Debian or Ubuntu system. One of the limitation that I observed was related to the wifi connection. As soon as the connection is dropped, there is no automatic reconnection. One needs to unplug the adapter or run ifconfig wlan0 up to turn up the connection again.
This limitation is particularly annoying when the Raspberry Pi is configured as a kiosk to display a dashboard (with auto-refresh) from an external website (such as Google Analytics for instance). In this article we’ll identify how we can configure the Raspberry Pi to reconnect automatically to the wireless network and run a refresh on the current opened page when getting back online.
How often do you need to send something from your phone to your computer (or the other way around)? As far as I’m concerned, it used to be pretty seldom - but when I needed to do so, it used to be quite complicated (either by connecting the phone to the computer with a cable, or phone and computer needed to be connected to the same network for instance) and time consuming. The need to transfer data from one device to another has however increased with my current professional assignment and this is where PushBullet comes into the picture.
Telegram is a free cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Web) messaging application that allows to be connected on multiple devices at the same time. From their own words, the application is build “with a focus on speed and security”. I have been using it for some time now, and I love it.
Urban Airship is a platform allowing companies to easily send notifications and rich messages to their customer base. The web application allows to define messages to send and one of their key feature is the possibility to group customer targets into segments. Those segments are created based on a set of tags – each tag usually describing the behavior of the user on the app (for instance, a tag might be set to users that logs in, users that have used feature X 3 times, users that have bought in app, etc.).
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers well known resources for anyone looking for cheap (if not free) computing power or storage. They offer a very flexible solution allowing to get started in minutes and in this post, I’ll describe a way to use S3 (Simple Storage Service) in order to take off-site backup of your data.
By default, Synology NAS drives do not offer any way to securely delete files. It is however possible to install a couple of tools to ensure that your files are securely removed from the drive. The first and easiest option is to install shred but it has some limitations compared to srm.
This is just a quick article to recap the process about installing bootstrap (ipkg) on a Synology NAS. This has already been documented plenty of times (on Synology wiki, another Synology wiki and on nas-storage-blog) so I won’t go into the detailed process here. In fact, I am mainly doing this to provide a mirror of the bootstrap file that is necessary for the DS111 (or more generally for any Marvel Kirkwood mv6282 ARM based model).
