Ladies and gentlemen, cats & kittens, the_simple_computer has reached its end. It’s time for me to move on. The site will remain accessible for the foreseeable future but it won’t be updated or added to. I thank you all for the support and kind words you’ve given me over the years. It will not be forgotten.
What’s all this? I often get asked where to begin securing this or that operating system, a network, or if a person should jailbreak their phone, or whatever. It’s become clear I need some basic reference material to point people to, so I give you (and myself): Baselines, a series of short guides to serve …
Dear readers, Not to creep anyone out, but I’d like to announce that I know something unique about all of you. Now relax, because this revelation doesn’t come from sniffing browser histories or stalking social networks. Rather, I mean this in a Morephus-esque sorta way: When you seek, you instantly begin to discover…or whatever motivational, …
Over the years I have accumulated many pages of changes, fixes and improvements to choose from when installing new Debian and Ubuntu systems. Eventually came the thought of organizing it all for public use and long story short, here it finally is. While the content as a whole is (well, I consider it to be) …
Update April 15, 2015 A few days ago, Backblaze published an update about this. Backblaze is an online backup service provider so a huge amount of reliable storage is fundamental to its operation. Backblaze uses a manufacturer cocktail of nearly 35,000 mechanical hard drives (at the time of their writing) to store customer data—and they’ve been keeping tabs …
I was going through some old notes and found directions I wrote for myself when the site was still using WordPress. And sharing is caring, right? If you want to create a website, an offline version contained entirely on your local computer will be one of your primary development tools. No domain or web hosting …
Here is a complete guide to full disk encryption using Cryptsetup, dm_crypt and LUKS, allowing you to tailor the encryption settings to your specification. The title says Ubuntu and the walkthrough happens in Mint but the instructions should generally apply to any distro which gives you either a live session or a shell where you …
Recently I’ve been putting together some Apparmor profiles for default and useful internet facing programs in Ubuntu-based distros. They’re completely custom made and much more restrictive than the default profiles from the repositories. Here’s the catch though—these are base profiles for you to easily build on. These are NOT drop-in solutions for 100% functionality right from the …
I always thought this site may begin dabbling in hardware but I had no idea it would start like this. Summer is around the corner for you northern hemisphere people and that means thunderstorms. Fun stuff, but if a destructive power surge makes its way into your house and kills your computer or worse, you’re …
Seven days after Microsoft kinda stopped supporting Windows XP, the world is (for the most part) no worse than it was last week. Here’s the reality: MANY people and MANY businesses have no intention of changing from Windows XP any time soon. All echo each other with similar reasons: the time involved, the cost, the learning curve, …