Tutorials

I have been pretty outspoken on my love of RSS as a replacement for social media feeds. It’s a recurring topic on this blog. There have even been a number of people who found my post How to Subscribe to Mailchimp Newsletters With RSS through a random Google search, and later ended up reaching out to me and thanking me for writing it because they found it useful. (If you’re one of those readers, Helloooo!...

Have you ever logged onto public WiFi, but when you try to open a web page that you already had open, it just won’t load? Sometimes this is because the WiFi is simply not working. In cases like that, it’s probably better to just pull out a book and read, instead of fighting a hopeless battle with bad WiFi. 🙃 Other times, however, the WiFi is actually indeed working, but it’s waiting for you to log in to it....

This morning, on day 8 of the 2023 Israel—Hamas War, my amazing girlfriend is mediating a dialog/debate between a Muslim and a Jew, about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last night, she was studying in preparation for the discussion, and we ended up talking a bit about the history of the conflict. I mentioned that a few years ago I had listened to the “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” series by the MartyrMade Podcast....

TL;DR: Those SMS authentication codes SUUUCK when you’re an expat who doesn’t always have access to the same phone number. TOTP is a fix to that, allowing you to access your accounts without needing to be able to receive SMS texts. The tutorial video below teaches what TOTP is, how it works, and how to use it. I use and recommend a paid Bitwarden plan for less than $1/month to manage my TOTP codes....

The Project 📹 A couple years ago I got connected with Andrew Case, the co-creator of Aleph with Beth, a YouTube channel with the goal of making top-quality Biblical Hebrew educational resources available to everyone who wants them. They’ve created hundreds of really well produced videos — lessons, practice stories, quizzes, songs, and more. Their videos are designed so that anyone, of (nearly) any age, with any educational, cultural, or linguistic background can learn Biblican Hebrew by watching and studying their videos....

I subscribe to a LOT of email newsletters. I haven’t counted specifically, but I’m guessing there are roughly 40-50 newsletters that I’m purposefully subscribed to and actually want to read (not just spammy marketing emails that I haven’t yet opted-out of, but actual, real content I’m interested to read and consume). Because I don’t consume traditional social media feeds, I’m left getting updates about stuff I care about from other sources....

I find myself interacting online with people from a lot of different timezones. Here’s a screenshot from an actual page on my phone’s launcher. Each of these clocks has been needed at some point fairly recently, usually because I’m scheduling a call with someone in a corresponding timezone. 1 Now, timezones can be notoriously complicated and frustrating to deal with. Because of the above-average amount of interactions between timezones I’ve navigated lately, I wanted to share some of the tips, tricks, and tools I’ve come away with (besides just having a full page of your phone’s launcher dedicated to clocks 😂), in case those tips and tricks might be useful to you too!...

TL;DR: RSS is the best way to follow content online. My feed is here. Try something like Feedly if you’re new to RSS, though the options for how RSS can make your relationship with online media more healthy and meaningful are countless. It’s been over 2 years since I deleted of all my social media accounts, and with them, all the attention sucking newsfeeds and updates that came with them....

In the deep-diving of the esoteric world of technology as I do, I often come across tools which the vast majority of people will never need or make use of. I tend to note those tools and log them away for personal use, as it is not uncommon for weird situations to pop up where I need some ultra-niche tool I’ve stumbled across in the past. Other times, some of those tools I encounter could make a lot of people’s lives much easier and more convenient....

This is a pretty technical post. If most of the words in the title above are gibberish to you, this article likely isn’t for you. You’ll probably like the other things I’ve written more 😄 ) In the spirit of showing my work, here’s a quick fix to an annoying little upgrade bug I encountered when upgrading a server from version Debian 10 to Debian 11. Immediately after upgrading, the WordPress site that I was hosting (Specifically, the nginx server software WordPress was installed on) started giving a 502 Bad Gateway error:...