But What if I HAVE to Encrypt with 7zip?
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. ...
tag: Howto
Check for Updates to OPNSense from the Command Line
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. ...
Fixing Firefox's Time Confusion
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. It’s incredibly disorienting to look at your email inbox and see messages arrive from the future! ...
Using Touch ID with sudo on macOS
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.) ...
OPNSense and BSD Boot Environments
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. ...