Recently have had to set up a few cPanel servers, and here are some things I ran into while doing so. One isn’t necessarily cPanels fault, but it still took me a long time to find a work around for it :/ Key based login for SSH Common practice for most cloud provides these days is to give you a VM with password based authentication turned off. That’s cool with me as this is one of the first things I do anyway. Read more

I had some time, and we had some TV’s hanging on the wall wasting space. So I decided to create a dashboard that could put some useful information on these TV’s for everyone to see Previously we were utilising the chromecasts with Greenscreen, and it worked well, but had its issues (probably more related to the chromecasts, not the software) but we weren’t using it as a useful dashboard, more just to scroll through some website links and display the occasional funny gif Read more

So I don’t know why this one took me this long to find, but I spent a long time today trying to figure out why my PHP script wasn’t uploading my file I wanted to slack. I had the string to send to slack correct, but every time I tried I was getting a no_file_content error. I was using the, apparently now, old method of referencing a file for POST-back. That is $file = '@/path/to/file. Read more

This is a nice little php script that you can run in the background via cron to constantly check your mail servers (or any server you have that deals with mail) and alert you via slack I know there are things out there like mxtoolbox that can do this for you, and include a larger list of blacklists, but I wanted something I could run on our own infrastructure that did what I wanted, and alerted me via slack (much cooler then email alerts). Read more

So I set this up a while ago, but thought I’d share it here anyway. I was looking to find a self hosted dropbox/google drive alternative. As I am starting down the path of getting things self hosted, so my data is still my data and all that. There were 2 choices with this, that would run on the raspberrypi: Owncloud, or seafile Seafile looked nice, and the core of it is written in C, so to me that would work well on the pi as it would be super lightweight and fast. Read more

So I’ve had a though for a while that I’d like something like Sonos in my home, but something like that is wayyyy out of my price range. Then I got thinking, surely opensource can do this! I’ve just spent most of the day researching and setting up a solution. The first thing that came up was pulseaudio. This cool piece of software can do all sorts, and one of them being able to setup up a client-server like environment to stream audio from a pulseaudio “server” over multicast to any mpd “client” who is listening. Read more

So there’s been a few occasions where I have needed to do a screen record on my Ubuntu laptop at work, and I was easily able to find RecordMyDesktop which is neat and simple desktop app that can get you on your way. The harder part was finding a program that could allow you to annotate while screen sharing. There are plenty of tools out there that allow you do annotate ontop of an already recorded video, but I wanted to be able to do it as I was recording. Read more

So just a quick one. I needed to create a video that has Picture in Picture. So we could have a video of the presentation, inside a recording of the slides used. Usually I would use Adobe premier pro for this, but as I have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, I though of ffmpeg. It is much less resource intensive then the Adobe product, but of course its all command line, so you don’t get a pretty GUI to play with. Read more

So there is an awesome command line tool out there called livestreamer. It’s awesome because you can use it to stream your favourite live things, via command line! No more watching it through a browser and have flash (or even just chrome) clogging up resources. Pretty cool huh? Another cool thing it can do it save directly to file, so if you knew you couldn’t watch it while its live (say your at work) just stream straight to file and watch later Read more

So I was inspired yesterday to create a bash script in which I can control my limitlessLED lights from my raspberry pi (cli). I always have a ssh connection open to my pi while at work, and when I’m at home I always have a terminal windows open, and tinkering around. So I though, why not? It’s still a work in progress at the moment, but basic functionality is there for now :) Read more