The default versions languages like perl or python often get updated in FreeBSD ports as the language versions get updated upstream. The default version of the language mostly lags the upstream version because many other ports depend on it. If you run the default version you have a much better chance that other ports that use perl or python will work correctly. There is however nothing stopping you to run a a newer or older version if it is available in the ports. Read more

First published: 2019-08-02, modified 2022-01-03 I am more of a Unix guy but I get to administer more and more Microsoft systems as time goes by. Back in the day Windows had very limited commandline options to manage systems. It often felt that you were working on a car with the bonnet welded shut. Luckily things changed when Powershell arrived on the scene. Powershell is a bit counter intuitive for someone that used Unix shells for 30 years but it is very powerful and you can do a lot with it. Read more

There is a new version of macOS out (at the time of writing 10.14 Mojave) and you want to upgrade. For the past few upgrades and this one Apple provided the update via the App store. This is all fine and well if you have a good unmetered(uncapped) internet connection to download the +- 5Gbyte installer. The big catch with the installer is if you follow the default install procedure the installer deletes itself after the install. Read more

There is a lot of false information around about the way Google stores information about you and how they use it. You can however have full control of your Google Account by visiting google.com/myactivity If you want to benefit from technology you need to learn how to manage it. This link was found on Lauren Weinstein’s Blog If you are interested in Internet Privacy and Security visit Lauren Weinstein’s Blog you will get lots of useful information. Read more

Windows sometimes has a mind of its own when it comes to DNS. To clear the windows DNS cache when you have issues do the following. Open cmd or powershell as administrator. Run ipconfig /flushdns

When a user doesn’t have a /.vimrc file in vim 8.0 (and possibly later) vim loads the default configuration file after the systemwide vimrc file created by the system administrator. This overides any settings the system administrator made. This is of course totally unexpected and frustrating especially when you upgrade from earlier versions. Some may even call it insane and it is definitely not expected behaviour. Anyway below is a way to prevent that from happening. Read more

Windows Software Update Services provides a way for Windows sysadmins to control the distribution of updates to windows computers. It also helps to save a lot of bandwidth if you don’t have a superfast internet connection. Unfortunately many think that it is easy to setup and maintain. On newer version of Windows Server it is easy to setup but it needs a lot of care and feeding. I you want to run WSUS you will have to run the “Server Cleanup Wizard” at least once a month, or run Invoke-WSUSCleanup in a scheduled task. Read more

Use the following command to get a list of files sorted from large to small on your unix machine. du -ak |sort -rn |less If you want the output to be more “human” readable use: du -ah |sort -rh|less This is useful if you want to cleanup your files, or when a disk is filling up.

Most of us get irritated by Facebook’s news feed at some stage of our lives. You can take some control back by installing Social Fixer

Wordpress is a very nice publishing platform that is very easy to install and use. Unfortunately with its plugin system it can become very bloated and slow. This site uses ghost. It uses node.js. It is much faster than wordpress, but your typical shared web hosting doesn’t support it. This site runs on a small Google cloud compute engine instance. If you can’t/don’t want to use Google cloud and can’t find a hosting provider that will support node. Read more