Posts

As everyone who knows me will already know, I am a little bit opinionated when it comes to music. However, I haven’t really had a decent sound system for quite a few years. I decided mid last year that I would do something about it and not only start getting back into vinyl (I know, such a hipster) but also get a decent sound system, so started saving. For quite a while I was looking an all-in-one system like the Teac LP-P1000↗ however, I decided I would end up painting myself into a corner with it as I would be only be able to use it in one room, I then started looking at other options. ...

One of the first things I do on a new server is install fail2ban↗ . I have written about it before, but that was back when I was still using CentOS 6. Now I am using CentOS 7 the installation has a few more steps. Firstly, as EPEL is not enabled by standard on most CentOS 7 installations enable the repo and then install fail2ban. Fail2Ban on CentOS 7 1/8 yum install -y epel-release && yum install -y fail2ban Once installed you can run the following to setup a check and block for failed SSH logins (it bans for 24 hours after three login failures); ...

As you may have noticed, the blog looks different (again). This is because I have moved from Wordpress↗ back to Ghost↗ using their GhostPro↗ offering. One of the things I like about Ghost is the default theme, Casper↗ . While I wanted to keep it there were a few things I wanted to tweak, such as removing the full page header image on main index. When I have previously used Ghost I have forked the theme on GitHub and then manually messed about getting any updates from the original code in. ...

Since I last properly [wrote about Docker](/2014/08/31/docker-fig-nginx-reverse-proxies-and-centos-7/“Docker, Fig, NGINX Reverse Proxies and CentOS 7”) a lot has changed. Docker have introduced some new command line tools which allow for easy orchestration of Docker instances, clusters and container management. These are; Docker Machine↗ — Allows you to easily deploy Docker instances to a lot of different platforms. Docker Compose↗ — A replacement for Fig↗ . Docker Swarm↗ — Native clustering for your Docker instances. Out of these three technologies, Swarm is not really suitable for production use so I won’t go into it in too much detail in this post. ...

It has just dawned on me, I have been using the “Aqua Blue” variation of wallpapers which stated shiping with MacOS X since I got my first iMac G3 in 2001. There have been a few variations of it, however the one I have settled on is the one with came with MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. It has been the first thing I have installed on every Mac, Linux and even Windows machine I have run since 2005. ...

According to my LastFM profile↗ I have been listening to the following a lot this month … David Bowie — Nothing Has Changed↗ The Smashing Pumpkins — Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness↗ New Order — Get Ready↗ The War on Drugs — Lost In The Dream↗ Amplifier — The Octopus↗ Flying Colors — Flying Colors↗ Depeche Mode — Songs of Fair and Devotion↗ Suede — Dog Man Star↗ The Stone Roses — Second Coming↗ Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin IV↗

I am currently using most of these tools day to day … Desktop Apps SublimeText↗ — Still the best text editor around Dashline↗ — Cross device password manager Desk↗ — Great editor for writting blog posts Photoshop↗ — For ermmmmm Photos OmniGraffle↗ — For diagrams and stuff Reeder 2↗ — For reading all the feeds GitHub Mac Client↗ — The Mac GitHub client Commandline Apps Home Brew↗ — Install “missing” stuff on macs Cask↗ — Install Mac Apps using the command line using Brew StormSSH↗ — Key & hosts management known_hosts↗ — A simple cli known hosts manager Packer↗ — Build machine images Z↗ — Jump around the CLI Vagrant↗ — Run machines built with Packer Services Digital Ocean↗ — Server Hosting AWS↗ — Server Hosting CloudFlare↗ — CDN & Stuff Github↗ — Code Hosting Pinboard↗ — Bookmarks Evernote↗ — Note taking RememberTheMilk↗ — Task management Feedly↗ — For managing all the newsfeeds Pocket↗ — For reading articles later Toggl↗ — Time tracking Authy↗ — A nice Two Factor Authentication tool Plex↗ — An impressive cross device media centre … so not much in the way of changes since I last wrote about the tools I use. ...

I noticed yesterday that my DigitalOcean monthly spend was a little more than I was expecting, turns out I have launched the wrong instance size when I last rebuilt my machine, so to save myself a few dollars a month I migrated the instance to a fresh server with a lower spec. By default DigitalOcean servers do not come with swap↗ enabled, because of this you run the risk of oomkiller↗ killing processes to try and keep the server accessible. Luckily as all DigitalOcean servers are SSD backed and come with a decent amount of disk space so enabling swap isn’t an issue; ...