Category: computers

My mom has used Windows computers since the early 1990s. During a visit in October, 2021, I set her up with a Linux desktop computer as her daily driver, and so far she loves it.

My mom is by no means a computer power user, but she does do most of the basics that people do. Email, zoom, chat, read the news, check the weather, print and scan stuff, watch Youtube tutorials, go on Facebook, etc.

I put all the major programs she uses on the bottom bar using the Dash to Panel extension, including:

I decided to purchase System 76’s new Lemur Pro 14″ laptop when it was announced and wanted to show it to you and give you a review.

A teaching fellow at the University of Michigan once asked me if I could provide some career advice to her nuclear engineering students. I started off with basic industry knowledge but soon came upon computers. When hiring people onto a computational physics team, I always expect a certain level of computer-savvy. But it occurred to me that it’s probably challenging for a young student to catch up on all the classic computer goodies. So I wrote a book about them.

Digital Superpowers hit the shelves of Amazon as an e-book tonight. It covers a bunch of open-source tools in an informal and broad tour, starting simple and building from there. It covers a few computer basics and introduces you to package managers before delving into short and sweet hands-on follow-alongs (and sometimes just drive-bys) with virtual machines, regular expressions, pdf toolkit, TOR, GnuPG encryption, LaTeX, Sphinx, pandoc, graphviz, Imagemagick, GIMP, Inkscape, darktable, Blender, Openshot, Audacity, LMMS, Hydrogen, Mixxx, git, Python, Django, Home Assistant, ESP8266s, Raspberry Pis, and self-hosting (among others).

Try it out and let me know what you think.

I’ve been trying to get some Django stuff running that can securely authenticate users against Windows Active Directory and also populate some info (first/last name, email address, maybe groups etc.). There are lots of resources out there but nothing was fully complete or modern and it took me some figuring/hacking to get it done.

Resources I found include:

• django-auth-ldap — the normal LDAP plugin. Problem: It does not natively support SASL and simple binds would send clear-text passwords. I think normal people would just activate TLS in this case but I didn’t want to do that
• A relevant SO post — with an answer linking to a useful snippet that no longer works on recent django versions.
• django-auth-ldap-ad — Someone’s entire different ldap plugin made specifically for this purpose. But it isn’t being maintained, is GPL-2, and doesn’t work directly in Python 3 or recent django.

Continue reading Authenticating and populating users in Django using a Windows Active Directory and SASL

I’m becoming convinced that Jeremy Howard is right to predict that deep learning is going to be “more important and more transformational than the internet.” If you don’t know who Jeremy Howard is, he’s part of the duo behind fast.ai free and high-quality deep learning course series, which is dedicated to making deep learning accessible to everyone.

Deep learning takes advantage of certain graphics processors (GPUs) to be efficient. If you take the course, it’s recommended that you sign up for an Amazon Web Services machine with an appropriate GPU so you can just run the provided setup scripts and be on your way learning deep learning. But you may want to try to get everything set up on your own machine if you happen to have one. I just built a small server and added a modest GPU just for this purpose so I figured I’d give it a whirl. This is how I did it.

Continue reading Getting your Ubuntu 17.04 computer set up for the fast.ai deep learning courses

I’m trying to learn ways to minimize my reliance upon large companies for handling my day-to-day personal data. So I figured calendar and contacts should be on my list of things to self-host. This post is about how I migrated all my Google calendars and phone contacts to my own server without losing any features I was using. I’m doing this mostly for fun.

Continue reading Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

I use SpamAssassin on my e-mail server to flag spam messages that come to my addresses. It uses a series of checks on each message and determines a Spam Score. If the Score is above a user-defined threshold, it adds a header that says that it is spam. Then dovecot files it away into a spam folder instead of my inbox. It does a pretty good job but requires tuning sometimes. I wanted to see if I could change my threshold from the default (5.0) without getting too many false positives or negatives. To do that, I’d have to collect some stats from my messages.

Continue reading Spam statistics from my email server

A year ago, my friend Laura was wishing that email providers could do some tone filtering and reject messages that are too mean. Since I run my own email server, I thought it might be simple to set something like that up easily. Turns out, it’s not that hard, but it wasn’t exactly trivial to figure out.

My setup

I run have postfix running to receive messages from the internet. It passes them through SpamAssassin, which inspects the messages and adds a few headers that indicate whether or not it’s spam. Then it passes them on to dovecot , which stores the messages in mailboxes and then tells with my email client, Thunderbird, that I’ve got mail. I like this setup because I feel like I have a bit more control over my data. Besides, it’s fun!

The plan

The original request is here shown below. I figure, if I could just have the message go through a second filter after it goes through spamassassin, I could make it a custom script that counts swear words.

Continue reading Adding multiple content filters to an email server with postfix and dovecot Pigeonhole/Sieve