Category: Working Together

We provide professional IT services, from WordPress websites, to Team-viewer remote support, installing computer into your network remotely, to custom software.
Here is how we do what we do.

Posted on

Some things to secure your website.

That does not cost anything.

Update WordPress

Anytime you login to your site and you see this.
Click ‘Please update now”!
Also, update all your Plugins and Themes.

WordPress Login

Every so often my server gets hammered with thousands of attempts to login with bogus credentials.
If you do not have the plugin “Limit Logins’, then every attempt is sent to the server backed, and of course rejected because either the username is incorrect or the password is. But still, this is processing power wasted.

The first thing we do is install this plugin.

Limit bad logins

This is standard on all new WordPress installs.
If you do not have it, get it.

You know your Login page, username and password.
If some tries and fails four times they are locked out for twenty minutes.
If after that they try again with four fails they are locked out for 24 hours.

Make your Site https

Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https.
To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.

Install and Activate

You will be taken to a screen to ‘Go ahead, activate SSL!”
On the next page click “Enable” on the line for 301 redirect

Hide your Login Page

Change wp-login.php to anything you want.

Install and Activate, click on the plugins Settings link.

One the next page , change the word “login” to some thing you can remember but is unrelated to WordPress or logging in. Say, “mywriting”.

Logout and login using this name and now wp-admin.

Wordfence

We will just be using the free portions of this plugin.

Make sure you have also used WPS Hide Login.

Install and Activate, on the next screen put in your email address so you will receive warnings when hacking attempts happen.

At this time we do not have a Premium Key, click No Thanks.

Posted on

rclone

I’ve been looking for a server solution, and I think I just found one.

On the Linux Server I run

sudo curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

Enter my password so this can be installed as root.

August 2020, had this issue:

Peer reports incompatible or unsupported protocol version.
TO OVERCOME RAN
yum update -y nss curl libcurl

Now I ran

rclone config

There was a lot to work through so this is what I did and what I wanted.

  • I have an unlimited account.
  • I created a Team Drive to receive these backups.
  • I configured my own certificates to create a secure connection between this server and my Google Drive Team Folder.
  • In my user fold on the server I created a Directory called googledrive.
  • I then ran this command to connect my defined Google Drive Team Folder in the cloud with my user folder of googledrive.
rclone config show
rclone mount theconfigname: /home/auser/googledrive/ &
the & completes and returns
df
theconfigname: 1099511627776 0 1099511627776 0% /home/auser/googledrive

Now that is a lot of available storage.
But then from this server I am backing up over 1T of data. And how to do that?

Issues

I seem to be able to get rclone operating flawlessly when I am backing up to a Google Team Drive. But to My Drive is still causing me a lot of issues.

Mounting Issues

I had an issue with mounting a Google Drive, it was fixed by doing the following after the error below.

rclone mount source /root/destination
2020/07/28 13:11:27 Fatal error: failed to mount FUSE fs: fusermount: exec: "fusermount": executable file not found in $PATH
FIX
yum install sshfs

Bad Unmount

??????????? ? ? ? ? ? googledrive
umount -i /root/googledrive

Posted on

Google Drive

One of the things I offer is an unlimited Google account for you and your family.

My account holds a piddling 500GB of stuff, my daughers has 2 terabytes of storage, but my best two people have 6 terabytes, that is 6,000 gig, and the other has 12 terabytes of storage.

That is quite a lot of stuff!

Why?

When you have lost a Hard Drive or a Laptop it is rather depressing, one of these accounts keeps things things safe.
What we have done is to make a single account available for the whole family. So for around $160US a year, you get Google Drive and Google Photos installed on all your phones, laptops, computers and tablets, and they all get backed up to the cloud.

Here is how it works.

You may be fimilar with Google Drive on gmail.

This is just so much more:

  • You have My Drive as before
  • You also now have Shared Drives, think of these as individual project areas that you can invite others in to to work on things
  • Then you have Computers
  • In my case just my laptop, but as many of your family that have your Google Drive installed on their computer their areas are automatically backed up.
  • Even when they plug in a USB storage, but of course if you plug in a 1T external hard drive it may take a few days for it to get fully backed-up.
  • And then you have the good old Shared with me, that we love but can never find anything.
Posted on

Using Theme Twenty Seventeen

I quite like this theme, the Twenty Seventeen theme from WordPress.

Twenty Seventeen

Regardless, one thing I do not like about the Twenty Seventeen theme is that it is too narrow.

Twenty Seventeen

To overcome this and make the text area 80% of whatever device you are viewing from, go to Appearance -> Customize-> Additional CSS and add the following:

.wrap {
   max-width: 80%;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 48em) {
.wrap {
   max-width: 80%;
 }
}

.page.page-one-column:not(.twentyseventeen-front-page) #primary {
   max-width: 80%;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
   .page-one-column .panel-content .wrap {
   max-width: 80%;
 }
}

Now we can see what the Twenty Seventeen theme looks like on an HD monitor.

This does not appear to do much with Post, and the following does help.

.wrap {
/* margin-left: auto; */
/* margin-right: auto; */
max-width: 80%;
/* padding-left: 2em; */
/* padding-right: 2em; */
}

@media screen and (min-width: 48em) {
.wrap {
max-width: 80%;
/* padding-left: 3em; */
/* padding-right: 3em; */
}
}

.page.page-one-column:not(.twentyseventeen-front-page) #primary {
/*margin-left: auto;*/
/*margin-right: auto;*/
max-width: 80%;
}

@media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
.page-one-column .panel-content .wrap
{
max-width: 80%;
}
}

.has-sidebar #secondary {
width: 26% !important;
}

.site-info { display: none; }

Posted on

Apple MacBook Pro, Blank Screen

Got a duzzie one today.

A Mac Book Pro model a1707, screen blank, but it looks like it is starting.

  • If I press enter it goes Boink
  • Reset NVRAM settings, reboot with press and hold Cmd + Option + P + R, does nothing.
  • Reset SMC settings, Mac is still OFF, press Shift + Option + Control and Power keys at the same time. Does nothing
  • Purchases a USB-c to HDMI, plugged in.
  • Setting up Screen Mirroring when not logged in.
  • This Mac has one of the changeable Touch Bars.
  • Fn-Ctrl-F1 does not mirror
  • Fn-Option-F2 does not mirror
  • Command-Brightness Down, holy crap that works. Hat Tip.

Posted on

Long time no Post

It’s been a long time since I have posted here.

But the wife has encrouged me that I need to put the resources I have found over the last few years up here for others to find.

The main point of this area is for people to find people doing intersting things, to find Open Source projects & Paid for plans. WHile I am a big Open Spource proponant, I am not against people who have a plan and sell it. More power to both ways of doing things.

So today I cam across this:

Here are his free plans.

https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/plans-joiners-bench

If you can not get his plans from his site let me know.

Posted on

I’ve been infected with an idea

Consider: copyright, patents and trademarks are not about creating exclusivity, perpetual ownership or unassailable rights to an idea, creative work or process.

Rather they are about giving a creator a limited opportunity to benefit from their work. A work that is derived by individual(s) from within their communities.

You write a book, derived from your experiences with in your community, who really created the work?  You, your muse or your community? Your community at large has given you a limited copyright to exclusively benefit from your effort, after which time your work will return to the common domain. Then others can benefit, create, extend, build upon, mashup and generally be creative upon the foundations that you were able to also be creative upon.

You can therefore see how this same principle applies, to a song, pictures, film, drugs, processes or ideas. This is the under laying founding principle of all copyright and patent law. That it has been twisted from this foundation is as a result of lawyers, executives and often missed named producers, altogether whom produce little, wear suits, bind up creativity, steal the art and parasitize the artist.

Thank God for the internet, where ideas are asserting their natural inclination for freedom, where artists can get rewarded for their effort and individuals can seek out what resonates with them. Art being more than sound and sights, the art of programming grows with free exchange, open source. Information, Wikipedia. Hardware, cnc and 3d printing. This is just the top of the iceberg.

A few of things are needed:opensource

  • Become a true fan.
  • Become a contributed.
  • Become a creator.
  • Become a user.
Posted on

Resources

Some resources out on the ‘Net.
everywheretech.org
sarap.is
www.icehubs.com
beta.knowable.org
www.opensourcewarehouse.org
opendesignengine.net
www.sparkfun.com
www.alchematter.org
www.adafruit.com
ouishare.net
icebauhaus.com

There is a huge set of resources out there and each of these leads off in to another line of things these people are involved in and have also found.
All this is great and gives us all an opportunity to find a place where we can develop our passion and join others with a similar desire.

Posted on

Why not start it.

Been following the wiki house site, they were talking about how the CNC tabled used to cut out the plywood to make the house can also be used to cut out the plywood to make a CNC table.

Unfortunately, as you search the ‘Net there is a lot of talk on various subjects but sometime a lack of the actual.

So my question is where is the CNC table used in this video?

Have a look at 3:40, the table exists and the table can build a table. So where are the plans.

wikihousetable

As Chris and I were talking, she made a interesting comment. If a CNC table can make itself, what if you got given (free) a CNC table with the stipulation that you had to make one and give it away. With the ongoing stipulation that the receiver had to make one and give it away.

Kind of like Habitat for Humanity, here people get helped in to a house, but they have to work on their own house to get it.

Get a table by working with your provider to build your table, give a table but have the receiver work with you to get it.

 

Proudly powered by WordPress