Noah Betzen Nezteb

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

Test your tests

Summary: test interfaces, not implementations

Tests that pass when something is actually broken, and fail when things actually do work, are worse than useless- they are positively harmful.

The requirement

Let's say we've been tasked with returning 400 when GET /users/<userId> is called with a negative userId.

The test

The requirement can be turned into a test that hits the endpoint with a negative userId and checks that a 400 is returned:

These are instructions for booting from an Ubuntu liveCD and installing NixOS on a machine. I needed to do this because the NixOS liveCD doesn't work on my machine (NixOS/nixpkgs#5829), so I'm just using the Ubuntu installation media as something to boot into.

Much of this is from discussion at NixOS/nixpkgs#14680.

Get the Ubuntu ISO: http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04.1/ubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso

Write it to a USB drive with unetbootin

Basic Snake HTML and JavaScript Game

Snake is a fun game to make as it doesn't require a lot of code (less than 100 lines with all comments removed). This is a basic implementation of the snake game, but it's missing a few things intentionally and they're left as further exploration for the reader.

Further Exploration

Score
When the snake eats an apple, the score should increase by one. Use context.fillText() to display the score to the screen

Exporting your 2FA tokens from Authy to transfer them into another 2FA application

IMPORTANT - Update regarding deprecation of Authy desktop apps

Past August 2024, Authy stopped supported the desktop version of their apps:
See Authy is shutting down its desktop app | The 2FA app Authy will only be available on Android and iOS starting in August for details.

And indeed, after a while, Authy changed something in their backend which now prevents the old desktop app from logging in. If you are already logged in, then you are in luck, and you can follow the instructions below to export your tokens.

If you are not logged in anymore, but can find a backup of the necessary files, then restore those files, and re-install Authy 2.2.3 following the instructions below, and it should work as expected.

Electron apps

Slide deck frameworks supporting Markdown source

SSH into AWS ec2/ Digitalocean droplet/ or else other PAAS, linux machine

Install Docker

$sudo apt install docker.io
$sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

I already installed docker

	// Usage:
	// Copy and paste all of this into a debug console window of the "Who is Hiring?" comment thread
	// then use as follows:
	//
	// query(term \| [term, term, ...], term \| [term, term, ...], ...)
	//
	// When arguments are in an array then that means an "or" and when they are seperate that means "and"
	//
	// Term is of the format:
	// ((-)text/RegExp) ( '-' means negation )

	#!/bin/bash
	echo "Enter the open dir URL: "
	read url
	echo "Please select:"
	showMenu () {
	echo "1) Download entire contents."
	echo "2) Create an index of content only."
	echo "3) Cancel/Quit"
	}
	while [ 1 ]

	####################################
	# Environment setup for Nix shells #
	####################################

	# From https://github.com/direnv/direnv/wiki/Nix#persistent-cached-shell
	#
	# Usage: use_nix [...]
	#
	# Load environment variables from `nix-shell`.
	# If you have a `default.nix` or `shell.nix` one of these will be used and