Tangible Bytes

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.

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.

My name is sean

This website is tangiblebytes.co.uk

put an @ between them and email me

Or use linkedin.com/in/seanburlington

My Apologies for not putting a mailto link or a contact form here - unfortunately these get abused by spammers to the point where I would likely not see any genuine message.

This sites does not use cookies

It is a simple blog and does not need to

This site does not use analytics

While there could be some benefits to me in seeing which parts of the site are more popular at this time I think the GDPR is essentially a good law which provides important freedoms.

It is right that people should only be tracked with their consent.

That said cookie popups are very annoying and I believe that the value of analytics is less than the costs of annoying people and so have decided not to track users on this site.

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

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

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.

Tangible Bytes is a small Consulting/Contracting company headed By Sean Burlington

Over 20 years professional experience of website and infrastructure development with clients in a wide variety of settings including government, business, and charity.

Experience working with major brands such as Intel, The Home Office, and The Ramblers - as well as many small organisations.

Broad and deep skillset as a full stack developer, and experienced systems administrator (DevOps).

Capable of working on most parts of a system from database to API code to JavaScript and CSS - I am not a designer but have a strong awareness of how design, brand identity, and business goals impact on a project - while UX and accessibility are cornerstones of delivery.

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.

I have a client who need to spin up webservers on demand to quickly test code and content, they use Docker to host these sites.

Currently they expose each site an a different port - which needs to be configured both within the container so that it can perform appropriate redirects, and by the user needing to get to the right site.

I’m automating the spin up process and wanted to make this a bit smoother.

I like to use wildcard DNS for ephemeral servers such as these.

A wildcard DNS record is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for non-existent domain names.

A wildcard DNS record is specified by using a * as the leftmost label (part) of a domain name, e.g. *.example.com.

wikipedia

I just point this address at my Docker server and then any name like website1.testsites.example.com will resolve to my docker host.