Tangible Bytes

A Web Developer’s Blog

2020 Archive

Posts from 2020

Postfix via Gmail SMTP

I’ve been taking a bit of time lately to do some of those low priority housekeeping tasks that can easily get overlooked.

By using quiet times to setup good processes life should be easier next time things get busy.

One of those tasks was to setup outgoing email on various systems - some of which are laptops and I’d still like automated mails to go out even if the device isn’t on the home network and can’t reach my ISP mailserver.

Back in the day you’d just send mail directly - but with spam protection everywhere this just doesn’t work and it’s far better to authenticate to some trusted mailserver.

I’m using gmail so I’ll use their servers.

Read more ...

Windows10 Installer Linux

I repurposed an old workstation and needed to install Windows with only Linux systems to work from. This turned out to be painful because the system has an old BIOS and while you can in theory install windows from a USB stick - doing so requires a newer system using UEFI Linux installs fine from a USB stick so this caught me out. It turns out the Windows installer works fine from an external DVD drive - but first you may have to buy some double layer DVDs because the image doesn’t quite fit on a normal one. Read more ...

Hugo Shortcode

I wanted to use an html <aside> block in my blog and this isn’t supported by Markdown

It’s fairly easy to implement as a hugo shortcode though

I created a file (path from the root of my hugo site)

layouts/shortcodes/aside.html

Read more ...

Writing Golang

I’ve really enjoyed learning Golang lately, the tour is a great place to start and I found using VSCode as an IDE really helped with automatic formatting and highlighting of errors.

Best things about Go so far for me are

Read more ...

Install Reactjs

I’ve been writing software for long enough to know that it pays to be careful at the start. You don’t always know when you’ll be supporting a project long term and may need to upgrade versions of your framework and related tools.

These are my notes of starting to use React with an eye to long term support.

Read more ...

Local https for dev

As more and more of the web moves to https, we developers find more problems getting things to run properly.

It used to be easier to run development sites on http and maybe have a config option pretending it was secure, or use a fake certificate (often labelled “snakeoil”)

As the internet has matured this has become more problematic.

Some things just don’t work without https, browsers are less likely to let you ignore the warning, and if you develop a PWA it just won’t work without a valid, trusted certificate.

SSL Warning

Read more ...