Category Archives: Computers

Why I can’t support Quentin Palfrey for Massachusetts Attorney General and you shouldn’t either

Executive Summary Quentin Palfrey thinks that rules don’t apply to him, which is a catastrophic character flaw in someone campaigning to be the state’s highest law-enforcement official. Also, there are several other, better candidates in the race. You should support one of them instead. Quentin Palfrey thinks that rules don’t apply to him On December… Read More: Why I can’t support Quentin Palfrey for Massachusetts Attorney General… »

What the heck is going on with syndication for the “Edge City” comic strip

TLDR Edge City is now being syndicated online by two different comic-strip syndicates. I’ve never seen that before and I have no idea what the heck is going on. There’s this comic strip, Edge City, which ended new strips in 2016, but reruns of the strip continued to syndicated online, and presumably in some newspapers… Read More: What the heck is going on with syndication for the… »

Adding malicious IPs in DNSBLs to iptables automatically

[This is an updated version of Adding malicious IPs in DNSBLs to hosts.deny automatically which uses iptables instead of tcpwrappers, since tcpwrappers has been deprecated.] I run my own mail server, which means that there are hackers trying 24×7 to break into the server by connecting to my SMTP or IMAP server and trying to guess… Read More: Adding malicious IPs in DNSBLs to iptables automatically »

“Tina’s Groove” and “Edge City” unavailable in comics aggregator due to Comics Kingdom shenanigans

Users of my comics aggregator who are also Comics Kingdom subscribers may have noticed that Tina’s Groove and Edge City have been missing in the aggregator for more than a week. This is because they are also missing on Comics Kingdom, which has stopped updating them without explanation. This is not the first step this… Read More: “Tina’s Groove” and “Edge City” unavailable in comics aggregator due… »

“Baby Blues” disrupted in comics aggregator during transition from King Features to Andrews McMeel

Users of the comics aggregator who are also Comics Kingdom subscribers may have noticed that the comic strip Baby Blues is no longer available as of January 12. Apparently syndication of this strip is moving from King Features (Comics Kingdom) to to Andrews McMeel (Go Comics) as of February 1, and the maintainers of Comics… Read More: “Baby Blues” disrupted in comics aggregator during transition from King… »

Hack of the day: enhancing Eastern Bank deposit notification emails

I have my Eastern Bank account configured to email me notifications about checking deposits. There are three problems with these notifications: (Century Bank’s online banking platform had the same problem. I was hoping things would approve in this area after the acquisition by Eastern Bank, but alas no.) This finally annoyed me enough today that… Read More: Hack of the day: enhancing Eastern Bank deposit notification emails »

Comedy of errors trying to update my bank account info everywhere

My bank was recently acquired. The migration of accounts into the new bank’s infrastructure happened over the weekend, and this morning at 8am, we were officially able to log into the new online banking site. We were told that any direct deposits or debits we had configured with the old bank’s routing number would automatically… Read More: Comedy of errors trying to update my bank account info… »

Hack of the day: using the Google Fi “Messages for Web” app on Linux to open “tel:” links from the browser and elsewhere

Over on Github, I just published some code I wrote to implement support for “tel:” links for Google Fi’s Messages for Web app on Linux. In other words, if you have Google Fi and you use Google’s Messages for Web app on Linux, then once you’ve deployed my solution, if you click on a phone-number… Read More: Hack of the day: using the Google Fi “Messages for… »