Made to Order Software Corp.

12/07/2022

I just received a spam message as follow:

> This message(s) below have been blocked by your mail server. According to our check, the issue is caused by the spam dictator which needs an upgrade

Now I do want a "spam dictator". It shall rule them all! 🤣

03/24/2021

I got my new TP-Link and installed it. Here are my findings, Pros and Cons and what I had to change to make it work as part of my LAN.

(My new TP-Link and what I think about it...) TP-Link AC1900 (click to find it on Amazon.com where I'm an affiliate) Introduction As my old Belkin WiFi device was not able to properly support UDP packets that it was not even concerned about, I looked into a new system and selected the TP-Link AC 190...

03/22/2021

Ever wondered why ffmpeg & ffprobe (and other ffmpeg library tools) always show a huge banner at the start? Copyrights & Patents.

In any event, here is how to hide it permanently so it doesn't bother you anymore:

(Removing the ffmpeg & ffprobe annoying banner permanently.) In some of my work, I use ffmpeg to compress/decompress video and audio files. My big problem with the ffmpeg and ffprobe tools is the incredibly annoying banner that they print and covers most of my console output. It's not only useless,....

03/14/2021

Got a PDF or Zip file you want to encrypt before sharing it over email and such? You can use command line tools on Linux, check it out!

(Hiding keyboard while typing.) Linux has options to encrypt zip or PDF files. Note that the zip encryption capabilities are not very strong (i.e. they can be easily cracked). So don't use it if you can avoid it and keep in mind that most anyone can see what's inside either way. zip --encrypt file.z...

02/03/2021

A while back, I needed to copy files between a VPS guest and my host computer. Usually, I just go with SSH (so the "scp" command), but in this case, the SSH connection was broken. This is how I resolved the issue, using the guest additions and creating a shared folder.

Cool side effect: it allows you to copy/paste between the two computers.

(Brdige between your Host and Guest computers) I use VirtualBox and had a problem with copying files between my host (main computer on which you boot your computer) and the guests (virtual computer that you run on your host). The fact is that it is all explained right here: http://www.virtualbox.org...

01/28/2021

At times Microsoft creates an update which breaks everything and it ends up in an infinite loop of blue screens of death.

Any kind of "repair" was futile, I still have the command I tried and then a way to make a backup of your files if you want/need to. It's not that easy from the console, but it works.

The fact is that the re-install will backup your files, so you likely won't lose them, but it's not a bad idea to make a backup first if those are important and you don't already have a backup. (This is where I think Linux is much better, but I think I'll keep quiet on that part).

(Repair your Windows Installation) My MS-Windows 10 instance would not run properly anymore. Once booted, the login prompt worked as expected (yeah!) but once logged in, the OS would crash after a minute or two and show me the blue screen of death (BSoD). I wanted to try a repair, so I looked into v...

09/12/2020

Whenever you are trying to debug a complex stack for your website system or some other software, you're likely to end up with one or two processes that either leak or are just very memory hungry. That generally results in the process using swap space. In order to find out who is using your swap space, you can use various tools which will tell you exactly the name of the process that uses the most of it. Here is a post about those commands:

(RAM & Swap memory exchange, but who uses it?) Limited Information... When a computer swap is getting used, by default you just see that swap is used, not so much about which process uses that swap space. The function I used by default is free which outputs that info: $ free total used free shared b...

09/04/2020

Even had a hard time hearing some YourTube or similar video?

What you need is a way to boost the volume beyond 100!

Or maybe you need a new set of headphones. I just go new ones and they are LOUD. I can now head all videos without a problem. I think that the new speakers are so small that they don't require much electricity at all and give you a very high volume as a result.

(Volume & Balance Potentiometer) Incerase Your Volume Beyond 100 I have been listening to many videos on YouTube, Facebook, etc. that have a really low volume. This is generally rather annoying since in the end I cannot hear a lot of the audio track. There is actually a way to increase the volume ov...

08/31/2020

Creating a new took me forever because, well, as they say, the is not what distinguish each node from each other... So what is it?

(Cluster Issues) Problem For my work, I need to have a simple Redis cluster to test that everything works. Unfortunately, when trying to setup the cluster, I was getting this message: Waiting for the cluster to join................ with the dots (.) going forever. Creation of Cluster To create the c...

08/23/2020

How to take a screenshot in (or old Mac OS/X)

It's a reminder because at times (rarely) I need to take a with a timer because the item is a .

(A beautiful screenshot) Ubuntu On Ubuntu, the default is to simply hit the PtrScr key. The screenshot of the entire screen will be taken and saved in your Pictures folder. However, in many cases you may need a special screenshot. Maybe just a small area or a window. I do not know the defaults exact...

08/23/2020

Some people use Outlook and thus use the integrated Calendar functionality. I have to say, that works very well in a company when everyone is on Outlook and its Calendar. It allows you to setup meetings, select a room, the attendants, all in a pretty easy integrated interface.

However, when Thunderbird under Ubuntu (and probably most other Unices) receives such an email, it has no clue what the heck it is. Now I found out how to make that work pretty much seamlessly inside my Thunderbird installation. I don't receive very many of those, so it allows me to pick the info and save it in my Google Calendar.

(A Blank Invite... Why is Thunderbird not seeing that content?) Microsoft has a special format that Outlook (at least) uses to generate an invitation that you can add to your calendar. However, under Linux with default Thunderbird, that looks like an empty email (well... in general, just the signatu...