Blog
Longer thoughts, technical notes, project updates, and the occasional behind-the-scenes post.
Browse the latest updates, announcements, and guides.
May 16, 2025
Remove Zone.Identifier files on Linux: find . -name “*Zone.Identifier” -type f -delete Zone.Identifier files are these peculiar little metadata files that might be cluttering up your directories if you work between Windows and Linux systems (particularly WSL). I’ve encountered them frequently when transferring files, and they can be quite the nuisance. Let’s dive into what […]
March 27, 2021
Occasionally for no apparent reason applications in the Volume Mixer are losing their settings and seemingly randomly changed so that some applications are no longer moving with the master volume slider. I haven’t figured out why this happens but it sucks. I wanted to save how to reset the volume mixer in case I ever […]
December 3, 2020
I was looking all over the place trying to figure this out so time to write it down so I don’t forget next time. I was using Virtualmin and BIND and trying to setup DNSSEC with it but was getting this error: managed-keys.bind.jnl: open: permission deniedmanaged-keys-zone: keyfetch_done:dns_journal_open -> unexpected errormanaged-keys-zone: error during managed-keys processing (unexpected […]
November 13, 2020
WP Statistics is a popular and powerful WordPress plugin for tracking statistics on your WordPress website. However if you have any plugins or anything that creates dynamic pages that don’t have a post id assigned to them then you will get lots of errors in your web server error logs like this: One method to […]
November 4, 2020
WinSCP is a great file manager program for logging into many different types of remote servers. It saves your sites into the Windows registry by default rather than a WInSCP.ini file like it used to long ago. You can switch this option in your WinSCP Preferences. Options > Preferences > Storage > Automatic INI file […]
May 12, 2020
I occasionally run into this issue whenever I switch OSes. If you happen to use a dual boot between Linux and Windows you might find yourself in a similar situation. You may be tempted to switch mail clients but Mozilla’s Thunderbird remains one of the best, even if it does feel a bit neglected from […]
September 26, 2019
Backups are important but sometimes files are just too big to save to your computer or to the server that you’re trying to backup. This is when you might want to backup to another server through ssh. Here is a command that allows you to backup a folder to another server: nice asks it not […]
August 25, 2019
The issue is that Virtualmin currently only supports a single version of PHP FPM and seems to want to use PHP 7.2 no matter what I do, and I want it to use PHP 7.3 which is also installed. This appears to be a long-standing issue with Virtualmin. I solved it by removing PHP 7.2 […]
September 18, 2018
I want to store this one for later so I’m posting it here. If you find it useful feel free to link to it. I wanted to version some files I’m working on but didn’t want to use a git service like BitBucket, GitLab, etc. mainly because they are huge and I don’t want to […]
February 26, 2017
If you’re running Apache web server and you have your site protected with HTTP authentication but still want to allow Let’s Encrypt/Certbot to be able to issue a certificate you will have to allow access to the .well-known folder on your site. Otherwise they may give you an error and fail to issue you a […]
February 13, 2017
First provision your server at your desired web host. I recommend using an 8GB Linode VPS. I could not get the server to start on a 4GB but maybe some day they will optimize it enough for that if you aren’t planning to have a lot of players. Linode is great because they have more […]
January 12, 2017
Recently I noticed a few sites had a page download instead of displaying when they were working perfectly fine before. I’m not 100% sure why but in my case the fix was to go into Virtualmin and toggle the PHP Version to some other version and back to my current one. I don’t know exactly […]
March 11, 2016
Here’s a BASH script I wrote which downloads and installs the Java JDK RPM. Tested on CentOS 6.x. If you are looking to install on Ubuntu (or Mint) go here. It also downloads the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files which are required for some applications. You must replace the version variables […]
March 9, 2015
Have you ever wanted to do a grep search on all files for a variable such as $_REQUEST, $_GET or $_POST but couldn’t figure it out? I have tried to do this a few times but end up just giving up because I don’t usually figure it out. This time I wanted to jot down […]
February 22, 2015
I had a website that was moved to a new domain name but I wanted to make all the old URLs redirect to the new domain. However, redirecting using a typical .htaccess redirect as shown below wouldn’t work because it was new using the old domain as a ServerAlias to the new domain/ServerName. RewriteEngine on […]
December 22, 2014
I recently had to update PHP on a server and the php.ini settings but then the date.timezone wasn’t set in a bunch of servers. So I decided just to search and replace them instead of doing them all individually. find . -name ‘php.ini’ -type f -exec sed -i ‘s/;date.timezone =/date.timezone = “America\/Toronto”/g’ {} + Note […]
October 17, 2014
I keep forgetting how to setup the mod_webpresence for ejabberd whenever I happen to reinstall everything so I am typing it out here for future reference and maybe it’ll even be useful for others. The instructions aren’t 100% clear for me on the ejabberd-contrib github page since I have always had issues figuring it out. […]
October 16, 2014
So many websites out there. They number in the billions. So many people trying to make their mark in the world wide web. Why start another website? Well I’m hoping to write about things I find useful, especially if I might want to reference it in the future, and especially if I’ve already had to […]
