According to both the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the IRS, my daughter, who has barely any income, should be able to e-file both her federal and state taxes for free using TurboTax online, thanks to the “FreeFile Alliance.” We tried filing her taxes through the TurboTax Android app. It didn’t offer her the option of free… Read More: Intuit / TurboTax acts slimy and/or incompetent yet again »
I put together a basic user guide for the comics aggregator. Enjoy! Comics Aggregator user guide
GNOME, the Linux desktop on top of which Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is built, has this neat feature which allows you to edit the keyboard accelerator associated with any application menu item, simply by opening the menu, hovering over the menu item, and typing the keyboard accelerator you want to use. Unfortunately, the way Ubuntu implemented… Read More: Editable menu accelerators under Ubuntu »
The comics aggregator supports several Washington Post columns: Ask Amy, Carolyn Hax, and Miss Manners (let me know if there are any others you want). I just discovered and fixed two issues with this: the aggregator could fail to pick up a column when the RSS feed published by the Post lists articles out of… Read More: Comics aggregator now does Washington Post columns better »
Good morning everybody! GoComics comics broke again this morning in the comics aggregator due to something I missed when I converted the aggregator over to the new GoComics site. The issue had to do with date formatting and therefore didn’t show up until we entered February and the current day of the month went from… Read More: GoComics.com fixed (again) »
GoComics rolled out a new version of their web site last night which broke the comics aggregator. I’ve fixed it.
UPDATE [2022-02-06]: I’m fairly certain nothing in this blog posting is needed anymore with the current version of Synology’s NAS software (DSM). My NAS’s SSL certificate has been renewing automatically for quite a while now without my ever needing to use this script. I don’t know what mechanism DSM is now using to renew Let’s… Read More: Let’s Encrypt with Synology NAS when you can’t open port… »
Does this sound familiar to you? Your Linux box has plenty of memory, but the kernel “oom-killer” keeps getting triggered and killing processes. The stack trace logged by the kernel shows that out_of_memory was triggered inside _do_fork (for me, it was mysqld forks that were triggering the problem; though I’d been running mysqld on my… Read More: Linux: What to do when the oom-killer is being triggered… »
Passport Parking’s pay-by-phone service charges exorbitant fees, doesn’t inform customers about the fees up-front, makes it hard to obtain a refund, issues refunds slowly, has a broken web app, and has poor security.
The comics aggregator is now accessed over SSL at the new URL https://comics.kamens.us/.