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Sunset on Mars is Blue! (found underside the cap of a popular drink) A woodpecker’s tongue circles its head, protecting its brain from the force of repeated pecking! Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada – (found underside the cap of a popular drink) The human brain struggles to process negative commands. When told “don’t think of an elephant,” your mind is forced to picture one first. This means focusing on what you don’t want — like “don’t hit a tree” — actually makes you focus on the obstacle. To overcome this, shift your mindset from the negative to the affirmative. You have to name the path, not the obstacle. – Simon Sinek 💝

Assuming you have: pkgbase and 15.x FreeBSD server with a bunch of jails bastille as the jail manager and that the host and all jails are on pkgbase here’s a single command to upgrade them all in one shot. What does the command do:

Last updated 20 July 2026 Development of the BRZ # A pair of vides explaining the rationale by Subaru engineers who developed the BRZ. Part 1 # Part 2 # The boxer engine, development, history, production

If you are importing about 25GB of PST file into Outlook Classic, here’s some notes for you1. Remember to run scanpst.exe over the exported PST several times before you import. It’s usual for scanpst to take several passes. Go until it finds no problems. This is a good practice to do especially on large PSTs. Also remember to increase the size of the PST via registry updates to make sure Outlook can handle PSTs of upto 100GB (50GB is the default), if you expect the final size will be bigger than 50GB. Of course, there are risks to using a PST greater than 50GB, be aware of them. On a 1Gbit line with SSD on the computer, it takes about 30 minutes to fully import the PST locally. It will then take anywhere from 4 to 16 hours for Outlook to push all the emails into the Cloud. During this time, there might be hours where your inbox in Outlook WILL NOT show the latest emails. It looks like when importing such a large PST (we had about 100k emails in it), the synchronization process is so heavy that even inbox doesn’t show the latest emails. However, the web version and phone app will show those emails. If in doubt, always look at message trace in Office 365 admin portal. If you have another machine with the same Outlook profile (say a user with two computers, after the machine into which the PST was imported fully syncs up with the cloud, downsyncing the new emails to the other machine is pretty fast. If they have good bandwidth, the downsync will happen within an hour or two.) It’s always better to do large imports during the evenings because Office 365 might throttle the import during the day. 😨

Sometimes, you come across Windows machines that are crashing because they’ve run out of disk space. And even after you do the regular cleanup, it either fills up quickly or you need more space. Here’s something to add to your arsenal.

This will be a compilation of windows scams. You can just copy paste the screenshots into an LLM to figure how to resolve them. 1 # This screams at you to call the number shown in a loop. Appears inside the browser.

It’s a straightforward installation of NinjaOne1 on a Windows box. On a Mac though, there are three permissions to enable. Here’s the permissions and the steps you can use to tell your client to follow so you get full access.2

Now with OAuth2, you can quickly set up Thunderbird email client to use with Office 365. This comes in handy if you use the Microsoft Office Basic plan that comes without installed applications. There’s a caveat though. When you try to send an email, Thunderbird comes back with an error saying it cannot connect. There’s a lot of stuff written on the intertubes about how to solve them and much of it is outdated. The simplest solution is as follows:

When you set up your email hosted on networksolutions.com, here are the instructions to configure Outlook (Classic). Open Outlook –> File –> Add account. Input your emal address and let Outlook handle it. If you’re lucky, you’ll be set up and asked to enter password. If not, go back, start again and the screen where you need to enter the email address, click “Advanced options”, enable “Let me set up my account manually”. It might take few seconds, wait. In the next screen, select IMAP and fill in as following: Server: imap.powweb.com Port: 993 Encryption Method: Leave it at None. This is the critical step. Changing it to SSL/TLS will not work! Leave the Require logon using Secure Password Authentication. Under Outgoing mail, Server: smtp.powweb.com Port: 465 Hit next, enter password and you’re set.1 🌄

If your Office 365 mailbox is getting close to 50 GB and you’re considering enabling archive mailbox, read on. When you turn on archiving, technically called “In-Place Archiving,” it creates another mailbox in the user’s Outlook with its own calendar. And the most commonly cited assistance page does not really tell you about the split unless you thoroughly read it and click on the section entitled “Instructions for end users” towards to end. To make matters worse, all emails and calendar items that are older than two years are automatically moved from the main mailbox into the online archive mailbox. Yes, two years is the default. There’s no alert during the enablement, either. Why they thought two years is enough as default is beyond me. If you realize you made a mistake, there is no revert button or a straightforward process to undo it. Pretty unbelievable. And even if you change the archiving duration to, say, 5 years or 7 years, it will not revert any of the changes. It applies to all calendar items and emails from the point archiving was turned on. Users who are used to checking their calendars and emails on their phones now have to take the extra step of looking at what is effectively another mailbox. And sometimes, the Outlook mobile app does not even show the online archive at all. (I hear the feature to show online archive was added only last year.) So now, you have a split mailbox, with emails and calendars in two different places and no quick way of going back. But you can go back. The following is a somewhat manual process, but it will work.

Sometimes you’ll come across Windows 11 computers that do not have the very handy “Microsoft Print to PDF” option in the list of printers to select. This option is very handy to save files as PDF and to split big PPDF by individual pages. Here are the steps you could try to get that option back and working.12

last updated 7 Aug 2026 Step 1: Purchase a low cost Windows license from here.. Apparently, the ‘Retail’ key is more reliable than the ‘OEM’ version of the key. Step 2: On the machine to be upgraded, start Command Prompt with admin privileges. Run this: changepk.exe /productkey VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T. This will require you to reboot the machine and install the files necessary to get you into Professional license. If you are not going to buy a license and are okay without activation, you can use it. But if you bought a license go to the next step.

I recently upgraded my nas from 14.x to 15-RELEASE and then converted to pkgbase because I just loved the idea of being able to do pkg update and pkg upgrade for all upgrades moving forward. After the upgrade, the version I was on was 15.RELEASE-p1. After about a month or so, when I noticed p2 was out, I ran pkg update and pkg upgrade, it still kept me at p1. Investigating, I figured when I ran the lua based script to upgrade to pkgbase, it didn’t (or I forgot) to say yes for FreeBSD base repository. If you’re like me, here’s the instructions to fix it quickly.

I run immich on a very old dell laptop with 100mbps ethernet with USB connected disks for data. The disks are formatted ext4 and the dell runs fedora. (Immich doesn’t run on FreeBSD yet. :( ). When the disk was full, I wanted to use my FreeBSD server as the data drive over NFS. And retire the USB disks. This required copying about 500GB of data from the USB disk to my FreeBSD server before I could switch over.

If you’ve had a VPS with Hetzner in Europe (very competitive hosting rates) and you’re a Tailscale aficionado you’ve probably used Tailscale and been unhappy with upload/download speeds in kilobytes when connected via Tailscale over SSH. It turns out one reason for the low throughput is that you use pfSense as your firewall, and it can be difficult for Tailscale to punch a hole through pfSense. As a result, it falls back to its DERP servers, which are shared resources for all Tailscale users and often have poor throughput. With that said, here’s a quick change to apply on pfSense to alleviate the problem.

You just bought a shiny new printer, say an HP, and you want to set up Scan to Email so that when you scan from the multifunction device (printer/scanner), you receive an email with the scanned attachment.

After tuning for swap space by reducing MySQL memory usage, the other area to look into would be php_fpm settings. The settings are located here if you’re using a freebsd jail:

On a FreeBSD machine with a bunch of wordpress website jails that work with one database jail, the system might continuously use up swap space if your VM has say 4G or less memory.

I monitor my websites with UptimeRobot on the free plan. It’s good, the timer checks every five minutes and for most hobby projects, it’s more than enough. The monitor URLs were set up as for example, https://prasna.ca. A few days ago, I realized there was ‘database connection’ error but since I use redis and CloudFlare, simple curl commands give status 200 and we never found out AND UptimeRobot was happy as well so we didn’t know the site was down.

This holiday season I read up on FreeBSD jails. I’ve always wanted to be able to set up secure and stable websites. And Jails were the answer. I’ve used Bastille as a jail tool, there are many out there and you can even do it without a tool, the FreeBSD handbook has enough to set them up.

After you’ve set up your FreeBSD box, having the box email you for all sorts of reports, cron updates etc is really useful. You don’t have to login to the machine to see them, you can get them in your email. With DragonFly Mail Agent, the setting of such an email system is quick and easy. Here’s the instructions:

I run proxmox 8 on an old 2015 ish Macbook Pro. 16GB memory, silent, 500GB SSD, it’s a good machine. When Proxmox 9 came out, I wanted to upgrade it to 9. Proxmox has an upgrade guide. Followed it, everything went fine. After reboot and upon ssh, I realized, root was mounted read-only.1

I bought two Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB hard drives recently for my home NAS. They’re considered great drives for 24/7 operation. I’m using them as mirrored ZFS drives in FreeBSD. One thing that took me by surprise was the noise of the disk! The first time I installed them and I was running them on a desk (yeah, too excited to place them in the case), outside the case, the noise was startling. I thought the disks were bad. I had to repeatedly run smartmontools to check that they were good and that the ZFS pools had no errors. The seeks are pretty loud and unsettling and the writes are noisy as well. Since then, I’ve properly installed them into the case and kept the case about a metre away and I’ve perhaps gotten used to it. I’ll probably move it out but if you have a lot of continuous disk operations during the day at your office, you’d really have to get used to the noise.

I recently installed Fedora and loved the CLI color combinations (vibrant!). I wanted to apply it to Ubuntu and Debian (Proxmox) servers so here are the commands, just copy paste it into your cli.1:

The following are the steps to connect a USB external disk to proxmox host and enable Time machine. The instructions work for macOS 10.13 → 15.7.1 1. Connect your USB disk and mount it # lsblk # find your USB disk, e.g. /dev/sdb fdisk /dev/sdb # create GPT + one partition (n → enter → enter → w) mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 mkdir -p /mnt/usb-timemachine blkid /dev/sdb1 # copy UUID Edit /etc/fstab:

If you’re like me, always running ssh to connect to servers and having to run processes and wanting to know what you ran earlier in one combined session, run tmux. No backgrounding of commands, no using nohup, and even if the ssh session breaks, which most of the time it does if you’re running something that takes a long time, tmux is the best.

Say you have 30 (or any large number) different clips in a folder that you just want to combine (concatenate) based on the timestamps. You do not want to reencode them, just want to connect/combine them into one as if they were text files. The reason you do not want to re-encode them is that it’ll take a long time to process them and you might lose fidelity of the video if re-encode was not done correctly. The following instructions will just concatenate the files and produce a single file as an output in no time even on old hardware. (Ran this in FreeBSD 14.3 but you should be able to adapt it to a linux box or a Mac with homebrew).

Last updated: 03 Jan 2026 The solution is a free software called Immich https://immich.app and you can run it at your home (or in a rented server somewhere) on an old machine with some USB drives or set it up on fancy stuff with RAID etc.

I keep a bunch of old hardware. The oldest one is a Toshiba Dynabook SS 2000 DS80P (circa 2001). But I digress. I also have a 2015 Mac stuck at Monterey. I’m always trying to see if my old machines can be used in any way so they’re relevant still today. While researching recently, I came across something called Opencore Legacy Patcher (OLP) that allows you to install latest Mac OSes on old computers! I was jubiliant.

I wanted to clone an external SSD at 256GB (source) with internal NVME 512GB (destination) using clonezilla. (It had freebsd in it). External SSD was connected via usb-c. The machine was a Dell XPS laptop.1 Each time I ran clonezilla, it wouldn’t show me the external disk. However, lsblk showed it and to make matters worse, if I chose the image to disk option, the external disk would show! I even tried with the latest Clonezilla live cd, “alternative stable - 20250620-plucky” and it had the same issue.

If you are setting up Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, you’re constantly having to check DMARC, DKIM and SPF values and then check if the edited values have propagated. Here’s a script that does just that. It even saves main zone records in a new folder with a symlink of the latest output. All output is saved.

If you want to quickly image a Mac’s hard disk (create an exact copy saved as a compressed file) and later restore it, Clonezilla is a simple and reliable choice. This method is especially useful for older Intel-based Macs where internet recovery can be slow or unreliable. Here’s how to do it.

Back in 2006, when I was trawling the second-hand electronics stores in Akihabara, Tokyo, I found this extremely slim and light Toshiba laptop. I remember asking the owner about it and he said it did not work and did not have an operating system.

You bought Google workspace through a reseller (say Wix) but let it expire. Now you want to get a new Google Workspace account directly with Google but when trying to set up, you get an error,

We owned a My Book Live, with 1TB HD as a “fancy” NAS Drive probably released around 2012. Because Windows 11 now comes with default SMB 2.0 and upwards, you cannot use it unless you install SMB 1.1 (SMB 1.1 is insecure and old). I had some older 256GB SSDs and I wanted to replace the existing HD with the SSD and use it primarily to stream music from the drive. I also had saved a 3TB image of the firmware a couple years ago. Here’s how I did it.

This is a checklist when you set up Google Workspace Email for your small biz so you cover the basics and fundamental security. The steps are in a chronological order for maximum speed.

Just a cheatsheet for terminal commands on a mac. Find all updates softwareupdate -l Install all updates softwareupdate -i 👢

If you have folder names in Windows that start with a tilde (~), they cannot be easily copied or deleted or moved. Here’s the trick to remedy the issue. Run this:

Starting with Macbook M1s, you cannot simply delete partitions in the hard disk. If you are one of those that installs linux and edits partitions, you might get into a stage where you cannot create/edit partitions anymore. Diskutil commands also will not help you. As a last resort, you might want to reset the hard-disk and its not easy as in the old models. To make matters worse, you’re probably in recovery mode.

Acer BIOS version R01-B1 has a bug where when you update the machine, Windows 11 will boot in safe mode because it cannot find the hard disk. The root cause of the problem is that, the BIOS update changes the storage driver to VMD which Windows 11 doesn’t seem to support natively, at least as of this writing.

It’s well known that Microsoft Defender (all versions as of Dec 2024) requires a Windows Professional license. Many users buy machines that have Windows Home. When we upgrade Windows Home machines to Windows Pro by buying an upgrade key, there are times when the upgrade misses out on installing some key components that are necessary to run the onboarding script for Microsoft Defender from security.microsoft.com. And the onboarding script gives an error like this: “The service name is invalid.”

Applications like Apple mail export contacts in VCF format. Outlook doesn’t understand VCF. So a conversion from VCF to CSV is required. Trying to upload the VCF file to Google will work but many incomplete or badly formatted contacts will be removed. This doesn’t bode well for data integrity.

What have diabetes, ozempic, high blood pressure medication etc. have in common with the most powerful venoms of animals in the world? Venoms saves lives! Crazy. Here’s the gift NYT article if you want to read it all it’s a long but very exciting read

Defender for Endpoint is a wonderful cybersecurity tool that works in Macs and PCs and in PCs works with Windows Defender, other Defender flavors that Microsoft produces etc. It has the following benefits:

If you’re migrating a large number of clients from Google Workspace over to Microsoft Office 365, there’s a bunch of software that allows you to do that. They require configuration but the task will be much more scalable, you’ll be able to move over hundreds of accounts with minimal time and hiccups. But if you’re doing only a handful of migrations and you have to install the Office 365 thick clients on client machines, doing it manually will probably be faster and cost effective. Either way, if you go the manual route, here’s a few things that need to be noted.

Let’s face it. You’re supposed to do important work but want to listen to some music you remembered on youtube and then get carried away into watching something more interesting, forgetting you have a job at hand. Kids with homeworks due are the most vulnerable :).

This message appears when editing a draft email in outlook and generally when using IMAP with/without a flaky wifi. The solution is simple: Solution # Open Outlook, File -> Options -> Mail. Uncheck all options under “Conversation Clean up”. Save, quit Outlook and restart Outlook. Workaround # If you don’t want to or cannot spend any time tinkering as explained above, you can use the online version of Outlook at either office.com or outlook.com. Online versions are not affected by this issue.

An update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor on 19 July 2024 caused about 8.5 million Windows machines (estimated) to hang and show BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). A fix was pushed out later that day but the machines that went down had to be manually fixed (as of this writing). Here’s a technical summary of what happened based on Dave Plummer’s video below:

Sometimes when you release upgrade freebsd, you might get the following error: Failed to load kernel ‘kernel’ can’t load ‘kernel’ can’t load ‘kernel’ Type ‘?’ for a list of commands…

Commands: freebsd-update upgrade -r 14.1-RELEASE freebsd-update install shutdown -r now freebsd-update install shutdown -r now Notes: “14.1-RELEASE” –> You can use replace it with “14.2-RELEASE” or any other release in that format. Before running the final “shutdown -r now”, you might have to do an additional “freebsd-update install” if any application is asking for it. 👅

To keep FreeBSD updated with all the security patches, run these two commands: freebsd-update fetch freebsd-update install When you run the first command, you can type “q” to get out of the prompt if you do not want to review all the changes so you can run the second command.

When you push commits to git, you sometimes might get into this error. I got this when pushing hugo code into git. git push -u origin main Enumerating objects: 61, done. Counting objects: 100% (61/61), done. Delta compression using up to 4 threads Compressing objects: 100% (45/45), done. error: RPC failed; HTTP 400 curl 22 The requested URL returned error: 400 send-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet Writing objects: 100% (54/54), 2.07 MiB | 5.37 MiB/s, done. Total 54 (delta 14), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0) fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly This is caused by git buffer settings. Run:

It’s been slightly over six months that I’ve been an entrepreneur for the first time in my life. During these months, I realize entrepreneurship is much more about you yourself than anything else.

Say you want to disable internet access on a specific computer in your LAN/wifi between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. every day and you have the pfsense (https://pfsense.org) firewall properly set up. Here are the steps:

Background # Say you have an old website on Drupal 7 with plugins that don’t work with the latest versions of Drupal. You now cannot migrate over to Drupal 9 or 10 without doing a lot of manual work and/or losing the functionality of your current plugins. If your requirements are still fulfilled by the old Drupal 7 website, there’s a solution to keep using it.

By default, when you set up a WordPress site using OpenLiteSpeed (https://openlitespeed.org), you’ll get a “B” rating in Qualys SSL Labs SSL test at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/. And even if you set up your minimum TLS version on Cloudflare to be TLS 1.2, Qualys reports your website still uses TLS 1.1. The following steps allow you to fix the certificate issue and get an “A” rating.

I’ve always heard of pfsense as a great opensource firewall with a nice list of features. We have an MR60 with two APs (MS60) for a total of three access points and its a great piece of hardware providing good wireless through the two stories. I wanted to control internet access and MR60 has a module to do that but only for a yearly subscription. I thought this was a perfect time to set up pfSense so this blog is about installing pfsense where there’s an existing Netgear MR60 with two MS60s.

If you are a regular user of ssh, you’re aware of some of its issues: ssh breaks when there’s a disconnection and it doesn’t reconnect. I use tmux as a stopgap so I can go back to what I was doing. typing on ssh terminal when the remote server is faraway is downright painful because the response times are so slow. One has to wait for the characters to be acknowledged by the server. and when that time you want to hit a CTRL + C because you ran the RSYNC command wrong, it doesn’t accept Control C in time. Worse, the SSH terminal then breaks down. Enter Mosh and it solves all the said problems and some more. It allows for:

A month ago at the Tradex in Abbotsford did I see drones being marketed for use in agriculture in the lower mainland. I thought drones for agriculture were a cool modern disruption because it would be so much cheaper to fly an automated drone than to own and fly little airplanes with pilots or huge (and costly) sprayer machines that need to be driven on land. I also thought it would be a good thing for the survival of the business when it goes from retiring parents to their kids - drones are something that the kids are growing up with, are familiar and excited about, while many might not want to touch a tractor! I also heard that there were regulations in place that obstructed the full scale use of drones and that the drone companies were fighting with the government over it.

Rsync Error: send_files(71922, /source/TQR6~B) rsync: [sender] fstat failed: No such file or directory (2) Trying to rsync between two different machines, I found rsync fails when it finds files that have ~ (tilde) in their filenames. I initially thought this was an issue specific to copying from a Samba Share to FreeBSD zpool. I couldn’t solve the issue entirely but figured escaping the awful tilde was a way to finish copying without rsync crashing. Here’s the command:

The benefits of FreeBSD are numerous. (Just ask chatgpt!). For me, it’s a very stable system, one that runs on any hardware, old and new, installs very quickly, configurations are in text and the pkg system that installs extra software is simple and powerful. But for a long time, anyone wanting to set up a home server or a VM to try with had to read lots and practice lots and even after practice, if you forget the commands, which happens when you use it infrequently, you have to google feverishly and many a time, the results the search engine finds might not be correct or actually be wrong. Enter ChatGPT and generative AI and things have changed drastically, for the good!

I came across one of my first hard disks when home so I took it out and brought it with me to copy the data out. It was an IDE HD so I bought a cheap IDE to SATA adapter and connected it to my FreeBSD machine to copy the data. (Feeding the power directly from the motherboard’s molex connector was more stable for the old hard drive.) Here’s the steps that worked for me.

Note of caution: Read the FreBSD Release Notes carefully at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/ especially the section called “Upgrading from Previous Releases of FreeBSD”. If you recently upgraded to FreeBSD 14 but you get the above error displayed before the beastie logo (see image below), here’s a solution for those with the boot loader in the MBR and that use the GPT partition scheme.

Tailscale.com’s download page doesn’t list if it’s available for FreeBSD. But it does work on FreeBSD (tested on Release 14). Here’s how: Install the package: pkg install tailscale Edit /etc/rc.conf to add tailscaled_enable="YES" Run service tailscaled start. If you get an error, reboot. After reboot, run tailscale login. Grab the url, copy paste in a browser and approve the connection. You can now ssh into the machine from another ’tailscaled’ machine from within your LAN or outside your home/office. How to update Tailscale # Once installed, when you run the command tailscale on FreeBSD as root, you get a list of all the commands. Use tailscale update to update.

It’s 2024 and there’s a fantastic tool available that can connect Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD machines together into a single network. Of course, that’s possible using samba, ssh, nfs or a whole range of other tools but tailscale makes the process super easy and very quick. And for upto three users, you can have a network of upto one hundred machines, free!

In the first line of the blog post this year by Neal Mohan the CEO of youtube is a link to the very first video that was uploaded to youtube, 18 years ago. ‘jawed’, the creator has a 19 second video where he talks about elephants having ‘really, really, long trunks’. Since his upload, until today, people have watched it over 300 million times (and with Neal providing a link like that, I’m sure its going to rocket even more!), his channel has only that video and there are 4.45M subscribers to it. In terms of earnings, youtubers who have a million subscribers generally earn around 60K USD/year. Let’s step back for a moment. Did ‘jawed’ at that time realize how significant his upload would be?! Did we?!

Vancouver Canada is an awesome place and did you know that in Richmond that we have a company that’s been working on Fusion Technology since 2002?! It’s called General Fusion. But the best part is the Founder and Chief Scientist Michel Laberge explains with pure excitement what it is all about. All you need to invest is 81 seconds. Watch it here and if you’re like me, you’re really going to enjoy it!

Every time I come to see you and go away You make me think. Lots. Forgetting myself in intoxication Of your presence Of your meditative voice That tells of stories far and wide Of kindness, hope, confidence, beauty and strategy. What a mix, I say to myself!

If your (old) machine doesn’t have a CD ROM drive or does not boot from USB, PXE boot to re-install a new operating system is the best option if you do not want to buy any more hardware to solve the situation. In the past, setting up a PXE server was a hassle. The internet is littered with linux configurations on tftp server. But if all you want to do is to boot your machine and autoload the ISO, here’s the fastest way with minimal fuss.

Reminds me Of the times together. Even in their death, They’re sitting here, Gorgeous and beautiful. Reminding us of the temporal nature, Of life, And yet, Living it all, Until the end.

On local machine, run ssh-keygen This creates two files /.ssh/id_rsa.pub (public key) and /.ssh/id_rsa (private key). Still on local machine, run ssh-copy-id remoteusername@remoteserver This copies your public key to remote server. Now try doing ssh to remote machine, no password should be required. if ssh-copy-id fails # Sometimes, ssh-copy-id gives an error and doesn’t copy the files. In that case, use this one liner but replace the remoteuser and servername:

It’s weird and amazing at the same time. You’re somewhere out there. I know of your existence by these letters you send me by the medium of electrons which themselves if isolated do not exist (Heisenberg principle). And yet your emoticons convey the thoughts and emotions as powerful as you were here.

Dream big! So big that sometimes you almost want to suffocate while thinking about it. It’s the only thing that keeps us going Gives us hope A reason to move forward A way to become better Every day, every hour, every second

We did some research into grants, funding and special loans available to startups and existing businesses in Canada when we were establishing Prasna IT. This is a compilation that we believe will be useful to entrepreneurs like us. Here’s a compilation of what we found.

I didn’t do anything big, I just updated my profile picture. True it was 15 odd years ago that I last changed it. But you were overjoyed. Ecstatic! You reacted. Lots. You said you wanted to see more. See not only half a picture but the full one. The full picture.

Everybody leaves. At some point. It’s a revolving door. It’s people. Natural. Nothing special or disheartening. Memories should be kept. Cherished. They allow us to be happy (or sad) even after the moments are long gone.

Prerequisites # Install PHP Install nginx Install Hugo # pkg install gohugo (install as root or do sudo) follow this after install - https://web.archive.org/web/20231202094641/https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/deploy-a-hugo-site/ remember to remove hugo.toml from the root directory otherwise you’ll get a “not Found” error! Tip # Install the GUI (maybe xfce or Kde5) so you edit md files, update them on the fly. Copy pasting and updating is easier with the gui and the terminal available. Refer to Hugo Cheatsheat if you need instructions to create the new site. If you start getting weird errors from Git, just create a new hugo site, copy your contents and config.toml and follow instructions again. IMO Github has a lot to be done before it becomes user friendly. I’ll write about it separately someday. 🌶️

Table Of Contents Start work on Hugo Content creation and editing Push to Git - one time only commands Push to Git - each time the website needs to be updated. Themes Emoji Support Google Analytics Old method - does not work for many themes anymore as of April, 2024 Insert Table of Content Insert an image Insert YouTube Video Add last modified date to posts Add categories and tags to your posts Add headings to your post

Login to Clouflare –> select your website –> Rules –> Redirect Rules –> Create Rule. Set “All incoming requests” to Static, your URL to be redirected to, set Status Code to 301 (permanently moved. Hit “Deploy”, wait for propagation. 🔴

To extract a static website from Drupal 7.x so it can be hosted on Cloudflare Pages, follow the instructions below: Install plugin “Static Generator” from (www.drupal.org/project/static) Run it. All static files will be created under “static” folder in the root of your Drupal Installation after you complete initial setup. Create a new Github repo, upload all files to Github and deploy into Cloudflare. Your website will be live in the URL you set up during deployment. If you do not know git, use “Git Desktop”, load all the files, and sync it up. As soon as the sync is complete, if you’ve set up Cloudflare pages to autodeploy (default mode), your site will be deployed in Cloudflare near instantly.

Cause - happens when a plugin update gets ‘stuck’ or when trying to update multiple plugins at the same time in WordPress. If it doesn’t go away: SSH to the server (or FTP) Navigate to the web root directory. It’s /var/www/html for Apache and Nginx generally. Navigate to the root folder of the website as you might have more than one website running. Find and delete the file called “.maintenance”. (rm foobar) 🎀

Cloudflare free tier is too cool not to use for your websites. It provides DNS management, free optimizations, DDOS protection, free caching and quick response times. Here’s how to set up a website.

There are only two ways to create revenue. Getting more business or by cutting/limiting your expenses while retaining clients. Frugality is thus very important for a startup where growth is not immediate and one might have to stretch their budgets again and again.

Tell Siri “Deleted all alarms” followed by a “yes”! 🍅

Install WSL (powershell command as admin “wsl –login”) Inside WSL upon installation install php download latest version of grav with admin console, expand in your non-root user account CD to the grav directory Run “php -S localhost:8000 system/router.php” Access Grav at localhost:8000/admin on the browser of your windows machine install any component that Grav complains about (generally PHP libraries) your site is at localhost:8000 🍉

Steps # Default install using Ventoy USB with FreeBSD install ISO update pkg by running to install any package ex. pkg install vim pkg install bash Install video drivers for ati - ref AMD section in https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/. This should take the screen to VGE mode with max resolution Make default shell bash: chsh and edit (vim editor runs) the tcsh out with bash install kde5, xorg, xfce, firefox-esr, mc, elinks, htop, libreoffice allow root to login as ssh: edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PermitRootLogin to yes; restart sshd Tips # Make root writable in single user mode (if you cannot login as root because you messed up the shell or have some corruption:

This page is frequently updated :). Didn’t know Vim offered spellcheck, handy when editing your md files on the ssh console; enter the following in Vim command mode: :set spell spelllang=en_ca Paste from clipboard: SHIFT + Right Click Edit all files iside the directory vim \* (open all files inside the directory) :ls (shows all opens files in vim) :w (write the file that is open) :ls (show all files. The files that is open is marked) :b filename (open the second file) repeat until you're done. 🌲

Wondering what Koshi river in Nepal, the Koshi Barrage and Indo-Nepal relations are all about over this? I don’t have a quick brief here but read/watch through the information below and I hope you’ll have a better view than the often politicized information in regular newsmedia. Write to me if you have comments to share.

40pc Petroleum Products 36pc Natural gas 17pc Hydro 1pc Others 76% is from non-renewable sources. 2022 Data - https://web.archive.org/web/20221019161726/https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-canada.html 🍓

Ask them to read in the following order (12-13 yrs old): Bitcoin Whitepaper: https://web.archive.org/web/20210906010924/https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/ After the dry whitepaper, this will get them excited: Silkroad - https://web.archive.org/web/20210917214326/https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/ 🐾

One of the best videos around!

The following is a compilation of some insightful YouTube discussions when the issue of Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh was raging on. Recommended if you don’t have a lot time # Former Ambassador Dr. Jaya Raj Acharya on history, foreign relations, and diplomacy Rakesh Sood and Kanak Dixit in Wire International Law Expert Apurva Khatiwada - What’s Nepal’s options if it goes through ICJ General List # Ratan Bhandari – informative Bishwa Bandhu Thapa – provides policy insights Dr. Ramesh Dhungel – informative Dr. Dipak Gyawali– some good information Achyut Raj Regmi – interesting to listen Rukmagat Katuwal – some relevance Dr. Keshar Bahadur Bhandari – good one Ashok Mehata- border politics Nepal China Anti Indian movement KP Oli on Nepal-India border China on Lipulek – some ideas Indian military in Kalapani Indian scholars on Nepal India border – thought provoking Reactive India SD Muni Ashok Mehata and Rajan Bhattarai – thought provoking Dr. Bijaya Joli, BJP India – appalling conversations Saurav with AP News – revolutionary but less pragmatic Dr. Prakash Chandra Lohani More interviews of interest # Historian, Dr. Dinesh Raj Pant Surveyor, Toya Nath Baral 🌷

Further Reading: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325036289_Ongoing_fluvial_recovery_from_medieval_earthquakes_Pokhara_Nepal Pokhara: Urbanization, Environment and Development Kindle Editionby Jagannath Adhikari (Author) https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/medieval-earthquakes-nepal-may-help-reveal-region%27s-tectonic-future Regmi Research Series - http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/journals/regmi/ Taylor, Carl E. “A Medical Survey of the Kali Gandak and Pokhara Valleys of Central Nepal.” Geographical Review, vol. 41, no. 3, 1951, pp. 421–437. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/210961. Accessed 15 June 2020. https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2012/05/23/understanding-the-seti-river-landslide-in-nepal/ 🌹

If you are PXE booting a client machine with an ISO file that is bigger than available memory on your client, the PXE boot will probably fail. This is because PXE boot is copying the ISO into memory. Nowadays, most of the OS install ISOs are more than 512MB, even for FreeBSD. So here’s the process to install FreeBSD on your very old hardware with 512MB memory or less.

tmux is a beautiful console program that allows you to split your windows. Very handy with today’s large screens. run tmux CTRL + B “ for horizontal split CTRL + B % for vertical split CTRL + B o to move from one window to another a cheatsheet lives at https://tmuxcheatsheet.com 🦌

To those who’re used to reading books where there is a plot, events happen and the story moves to an end or a goal, the “stream of consciousness” technique comes rather as a surprise. Some like it, many others find it dense and cannot carry on after a few pages.