Posts Categorised: Web Technologies

0BT Mesh WiFi

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

After repla­cing my BT SmartHub with a pfsense router, I’ve been look­ing to upgrade the house WiFi as well. Most devices are wired as most rooms have wired con­nec­tions I fit­ted for my par­ents years ago when wire­less was barely a real­ity. How­ever phones, tab­lets, e‑readers, and laptops really do work best with wire­less (or only with wire­less in some cases), and to work well need a wire­less sys­tem that enables mobility.
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2Replacing the BT Infinity SmartHub with pfsense

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

When I moved into a new home a year ago I was finally able to join the 21st cen­tury and ordered BT Infin­ity which is sup­plied with a SmartHub. The SmartHub is actu­ally reas­on­ably decent kit con­sid­er­ing it comes for free, but as with most ISP sup­plied devices it is locked down in some ways, for example you can­’t use your own DNS serv­ers which I prefer to do. In the early days of ADSL (circa 2001) I ran a smooth­wall box in place of a router, and for a range of reas­ons (includ­ing inter­net fil­ter­ing con­trolled by me, rather than an ISP) I decided to go back to a linux-based fire­wall router.
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0VPS Tweaks to improve web performance

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Whilst I haven’t writ­ten many new art­icles recently I have spent con­sid­er­able time updat­ing and revis­ing the behind-the-scenes side of things, namely vari­ous secur­ity (TLS) set­tings on my VPS that hosts sev­er­al sites includ­ing this one.  Anoth­er thing I have also worked to enhance recently is to improve my use of gzip, and a new format called brotli

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0Karoo ADSL settings

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Hav­ing com­pleted the migra­tion of the site to the new serv­er, and with the fest­ive sea­son upon us, I’m back being the fam­ily tech­nic­al sup­port. First chal­lenge of this year was to restore ser­vice to my grand­fath­ers broad­band which has­n’t been work­ing since he mis­takenly pressed the reset but­ton on his wire­less router.
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2pale moonPale Moon: Firefox enhanced and in 64bit

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I’ve been look­ing for a 64bit Fire­fox for a couple of years now, pretty much since Java and Flash play­er became avail­able in 64bit.  Moz­illa seem in no hurry to pro­gress the mine­field night­lies into a full release, but sev­er­al third parties have taken the open source code and com­piled it for 64bit.  I’ve looked at sev­er­al of these and the best sup­por­ted and most reg­u­larly updated seems to be a build called Pale Moon.

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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoIE10 for Windows 7 finally arrives

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Anoth­er item that we’re a bit late to cov­er is the arrival of Inter­net Explorer 10 for Win­dows 7 (and Serv­er 2008 R2).  As with past releases, older OSes are being left behind with no sup­port for Vista or XP, which are stuck on IE9 and IE8 respect­ively.  If you have Win­dows 7 we recom­mend upgrad­ing (even if you don’t use IE) and of course there is no harm giv­ing it a try.  We’ll prob­ably be stick­ing with Fire­fox and Chrome ourselves, but IE some­times has its uses.

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0Spell Checker - Spelling PoliceInstall a spellchecker for your browser

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Let me start with an admis­sion: I’m one of those ped­ants on Face­book who likes to cor­rect your spelling, punc­tu­ation and gram­mar.  Some of you will think this is per­fectly reas­on­able, whilst oth­ers will prob­ably want an explan­a­tion.  If you are one of the lat­ter read on.

The simple fact is that as a social spe­cies our exist­ence depends on com­mu­nic­a­tion, the clear­er the bet­ter.  When their only con­tact with you is vir­tu­al oth­er people will make judge­ments about you based on what is avail­able to them — includ­ing your SPG.  I cor­rect spellings on Face­book for 2 reas­ons: 1. because I’m a teach­er so it’s a habit; 2. because with mod­ern web-browsers there is quite simply no excuse for incor­rect spelling.  So, to help every­one, here is a quick guide to enabling an auto­mat­ic ‘Microsoft word like” spell-check­er in your web-browser…

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0HTML5 LogoHTML5 spec finished and published!

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At long last, the W3C has pub­lished the final HTML5 spe­cific­a­tion.  DIY Media Home is already writ­ten coded in HTML5, but the final­isa­tion of the spe­cific­a­tion means that HTML5 com­pli­ance is no longer a mov­ing tar­get for either us, or the browser makers.  Hope­fully all the main play­ers will provide fully HTML5 com­pli­ant browsers soon.  In the mean­time we’ll be work­ing to ensure our site is fully com­pli­ant with the final spec.

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0Tin full of spamHow to reduce spam with SPF, DKIM & DMARC

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Since I set up con­tact forms on vari­ous web­sites I’ve had a slowly increas­ing volume of spam.  Not dir­ect spam sent to me, but bounces from non-exist­ent addresses that were being spamme, appar­ently from my address.  Unfor­tu­nately the spam was­n’t ori­gin­at­ing from my address, but my address was some­how picked up (prob­ably from before I secured the con­tact forms on the site) and was being used as the “reply to” address.  After some invest­ig­a­tion I heard about SPF which is an e‑mail anti-for­gery system.

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