So for a long time, I’ve been wondering why I can’t use a locally mounted directory within one of my containers – I’d just get an empty directory on the volume mount point inside the container. A lot of googling yielded nothing, but then when I ran ps -aux | grep -i docker I noticed docker was running via snap.

It then occurred to me that snap has restrictions on what parts of the filesystem it allows it’s ‘snaps’ to read – this indeed was the problem so a quick uninstall of the snapped version of docker and installed via apt fixed the issue once and for all.

Key search terms for future me/anyone else: docker volume empty docker-compose volume empty.

After quite some time I’ve managed to get my server back online. The issue was that running it on a raspberry pi 3 alongside other things pretty much ensured the OOM killer would kick in and start killing things off.

I got one of those HP elitedesk PCs for only £40 off eBay to host this and it’s superb! This is now running in a docker container on a low powered 8gb system. You get far more bang for buck compared to a raspberry pi this way.

In terms of comments, it turns out I have about 3500 unmoderated comments, so it’s likely I’ll have to just bin them all due to time constraints. Apologies if you’ve written something useful.

I’ve got some interesting posts coming soon, including how this is all hosted now (major upgrades all around in that sense, but for no (big) extra cost. Some cool things I’ve been playing with and much more.

This site is now hosted on my raspberry pi zero w – incredible! Hosting costs are now on a real shoestring budget. I’ll be tinkering with it to get the site to perform a bit better (microssd is not fast..) This was part fun experiment, part cost saving exercise.

This handy snippet is useful for seeing what merged PRs there are between two branches – eg master/release or whatever you’re using. I find it v.handy:

git log --merges --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative origin/production..origin/master

I recently had to use hashcat to verify some user credentials. Here are the commands I used:

# Salted md5 passwords (all the same salt in salt+password format):
hashcat -o found-passwords.pot -e salt.txt -m 20 -a 0 input-passwords.txt hashkiller.dic

Input file is just hashes from the database, one hash per line. I think you can put a :salt after each hash and omit the -e salt.txt from the command to use unique salts.

Recently, the instant messaging app “WhatsApp” announced that it is using end to end encryption. While this is generally seen as a good thing, what most people seem to have forgotten is that we have absolutely no reason to trust WhatsApp.

Just because you’re told WhatsApp is using end to end encryption doesn’t really mean anything.. what algorithms are they using, how can we verify this. Most importantly, if the NSA (or someone else, perhaps with lots of money) asks WhatsApp to disable end to end encryption for a specific user – what’s to stop them? How would you know your instant messages are no longer encrypted?

What this means (at least to me) is that your supposed end to end ‘bullet proof’ encryption is probably worse than nothing – it’s lulling you into a false sense of security.

You can’t trust closed source encryption. Ever. Don’t start now.

Most of the time I don’t want a local install of composer, I want it installed system-wide. Here’s how to do it:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -d "allow_url_fopen = 1" -d "open_basedir =" -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

For some time now I have been keeping myself abreast of the Oculus Rift project – a brand new virtual reality kit which is due for release this year.

Normally I wouldn’t be interested in things like this but I believe this new VR headset will change the face of not only gaming but many aspects of our lives, and not always for the better.

Back in the 90’s I had a go with a VR headset in London and it really put me off the idea. The terrible low resolution, the neck ache, the lag… It was really crap. From that point on virtual reality got forgotten about for another twenty years or so while the technology caught up with the concept.

Oculus aims, and supposedly delivers an experience which can effectively trick (part of) your brain into feeling the experience is very real. In a nutshell, virtual reality is here and this time it’s not going away.

So many people see this as just another gaming platform. That’s cool, but I believe it will be used for many other applications such as virtual meetings, and even eventually working.. Imagine working on a desk on a beach with palm trees?

It’s not all good news though. In this internet based age people spend less and less time going outside and talking to each other. VR could well be the ultimate end to people leaving their homes.. Maybe not for our generation, but I think the next generation will really struggle with this.. Games like World of Warcraft have already made lots of young people reclusive gaming addicts, but with this level of reality it could do some very serious damage if not used in moderation.

Either way, 2015 marks the beginning of the virtual reality age. Personally I think this is going to be as big, if not bigger than the internet in terms of its impact on society. This won’t happen this year, but in the next 5 or 10 years things will be very different in the western world.

So you’ve updated your .gitignore, yet some files (log files?) have changed and git still thinks you might want to commit them.

Try this:

git update-index --assume-unchanged directory/

or

git update-index --assume-unchanged blah/file.log

Thanks to SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/655243/ignore-modified-but-not-committed-files-in-git