tag: howto

Yes, I know I updated the tools page and now recommend against encrypting with 7zip. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. ...

As part of my morning routine, I have a few scripts I run to make sure my laptop and servers are up to date. Rather than login to the web GUI of my OPNSense firewall, I created an alias to check for updates from the CLI. Add the following line to .bash_aliases or directly to .bashrc: alias check-update='sudo /usr/local/opnsense/scripts/firmware/launcher.sh check' There are a few small, but interesting, additional steps required for the alias to work over a “non-interactive” SSH session....

The Problem I am re-evaluating Firefox as my everyday browser (moving back from Brave) and was reminded of the Multi-account container functionality today. That is a killer feature, IMHO. I’d been running several instances of Brave under different profiles to keep things separate, but this is so much easier (and better with RAM, maybe?). However, I was also reminded of an incredibly annoying and frustrating side-effect of Firefox’s now-default privacy feature to prevent browser/device fingerprinting: the timezone for my device is mis-reported to websites, so the displayed timestamps of messages are off by hours....

Here’s a quick cheat sheet for my own reference. macOS supports the use of Touch ID for sudo authentication. Yes, I still love to live in the terminal, so this is an everyday, multiple times a day thing for me. Fortunately, it’s a very quick edit to enable the functionality and it saves a TON of time (vs entering your password each time you run the sudo command - or worse, setting the NOPASSWD option....

I’ve been using OPNSense for my home firewall for many years now, and I previously ran it as a VM in a Proxmox virtual server. That worked great for my purposes, but I’ve since upgraded to a dedicated physical device (Protectli) running OPNSense and I love it. However, with the migration away from a VM, I lost the ability to create a snapshot of the system prior to an upgrade - just in case something went wrong I could easily roll back....