Sometimes, when I try to use certain functions on wordpress.com, I get redirected to a login page. After I sign-in, I get redirect again to the same login page. This repeats in an endless loop. It usually doesn’t bother me, as I self-host my blog, but for some things, like the yearly annual report that came in about two weeks ago, it does bother. I looked up into the matter, and the issue turned up to be due to blocking third-party cookies. To resolve the endless login loop, you need to add https://wordpress.com (note the https) to the exception list of accepted third-party cookies (In Firefox it’s under Preferences -> Privacy -> Exceptions).
Category: Tips
Skip Updates When Using the Let’s Encrypt `letsencrypt-auto` Client
To use Let’s Encrypt CA to issue free certificates, you need to use their client. The recommended method to install it is to use letsencrypt-auto, a script that automatically fetches and installs all the required dependencies. There is no doubt, that the letsencrypt-auto is the fastest and simplest way to get a Let’s Encrypted client up and running. I’ve used it myself, when I wrote a guide to get Let’s Encrypt up and running easily.
Automatically updating required dependencies, has its downside. As letsencrypt-auto does it every time you run it, it quickly gets annoying. Running a simple ./letsencrypt-auto --help takes a whopping 15 seconds, just figuring out that there are no updates available. Supposing that you know that no update are available, and you wish to save some time, you can run the letsencrypt executable directly, skipping the updating process of lestencrypt-auto:
~/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt
Most of the actions require you to be root, so you might need to run it with sudo.
You can expect this issue to be resolved in the future. There is already an open issue for it and an active work that will resolve it.
Installing Debian Unstable’s source Packages in Debian Jessie
Sometimes a package that you need is not available for Debian Jessie, but you can find it for Sid (unstable). You may be tempted to try to install it manually, by downloading the binary deb package, but it will most likely fail due to binary incompatibilities with different libraries’ versions you have. The better method will be to get the source package used to build the binary package, and build it yourself. Most of the time the process is not as hard as it sounds.
First, a short preliminary setup is needed Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib
You can replace unstable with testing if you prefer to use packages from testing. Update the lists of packages
sudo apt-get update
Next you need, to get the build dependencies for your package. The example below uses the package lyx:
sudo apt-get build-dep lyx/unstable
Now you are ready to fetch and build the source package:
sudo apt-get source -b lyx/unstable
Finally, you will see in the current directory the resulting DEBs. Simply install them:
sudo gdebi lyx-common_2.1.4-2_all.deb
sudo gdebi lyx_2.1.4-2_amd64.deb
You can later mark the dependecies that you manually installed as automatic:
sudo apt-mark auto lyx-common
Installing the latest version of Iceweasel (Firefox) on Debian Jessie
The jessie-backports repository does not have the latest Iceweasel builds. However, the Debian Mozilla team releases its own backports. To use their backports follow the steps below:
# apt-get install pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring
# echo "deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ jessie-backports iceweasel-release" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get install -t jessie-backports iceweasel
At the time of writing this post, the Mozilla team’s repository provides Iceweasel 42, compared with 38.4 with the regular Jessie repository.
Gnome `Alt+Shift` and `Alt+Shift+Tab`
After installing Debian Jessie with Gnome 3.14, I noticed an annoying bug: When I tried to switch windows using Alt+Tab it worked as it should, but when I tried to switch in reverse order, using Alt+shit+Tab it did not work. I quickly figured out that the problem lies in the frequently used shortcut, Alt+Shift for switching keyboard layouts. Indeed, when I tried cycling through windows, I switched keyboard layouts instead.
The gist of the solution was found after some searching in Stack Exchange albeit it needs some adjustment for newer version of Gnome: Start the Gnome’s Tweak Tool and select Typing from the Tweaks menu. Under “Miscellaneous compatibility options” select “Shift cancels Caps Lock”.
This fixed the issue for me, without any side-effects. I don’t need to use Shift-Alt instead of Alt-Shift as suggested in the original solution and neither the Shift key cancels the Caps Lock as may be suggested by this option.
Update 2020-06-08: In Gnome 3.36 the relevant setting appears under Keyboard & Mouse -> Additional Layout Options -> Miscellaneous compatibility options.
Creating Menu Entries for Calibre
I recently installed Calibre using their binary installer for linux, and found out that it doesn’t come with .desktop files, so Calibre doesn’t appear in the GNOME menu. To remedy this I installed the following desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications/ (modified from the Debian Sid package):
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=E-Book Viewer
Comment=E-Book Viewer
TryExec=/home/user/.local/calibre/ebook-viewer
Exec=/home/user/.local/calibre/ebook-viewer %F
Icon=/home/user/.local/calibre/resources/images/viewer.png
MimeType=application/x-mobipocket-ebook;application/epub+zip;
Categories=Office;Graphics;Viewer;
and
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Calibre
GenericName=E-book library management
GenericName[de]=E-Book Bibliotheksverwaltung
Comment=E-book library management
Comment[es]=aplicación para la gestión de libros electrónicos
Comment[de]=E-Book Bibliotheksverwaltung
TryExec=/home/user/.local/calibre/calibre
Exec=/home/user/.local/calibre/calibre %f
Icon=/home/user/.local/calibre/resources/images/lt.png
Categories=Office;Database;FileTools;Viewer;Qt;
MimeType=x-content/ebook-reader;
You may need to adjust the paths for TryExec, Exec and Icon to match where you installed Calibre.
RTL Tiddlers in TiddlyWiki 5
Few years ago I wrote about how to create RTL (right-to-left) tiddlers in TiddlyWiki. Creating RTL tiddlers is almost a necessity if you want to create tiddlers in a right-to-left language such as Hebrew or Arabic. TiddlyWiki5, the new version of TiddlyWiki, broke the old solution, but a similar one is can be made. In order to be able to add RTL tiddlers to your TiddlyWiki follow these steps:
Continue reading RTL Tiddlers in TiddlyWiki 5
Kindle Paperwhite “Unable to Open Item”
Recently, I tried transfering some new ebook to my Kindle Paperwhite (first generation), the books were listed properly. However, when I tried to open them I got
“Unable to Open Item” error, suggesting I re-download the books from Amazon. I tried transferring the files again and again, but it didnt’ help. Some of the books were mobi files while others were “AZW` (which I got from אינדיבוק) and all of them opened fine on my computer.
Finally, I followed an advice from a comment in the KindledFans blog, and converted the files to AZW3 (the original comment suggested mobi but AZW3 works better with Hebrew). After converting, I moved the files to my Kindle and they opened just fine.
Enabling Compose-Key in GNOME 3.4
For some reason I couldn’t easily find how to enable the compose-key in Gnome 3.4. All the references I’ve found did not match the actual menus and dialogs that I saw on my system. That is including the official GNOME help pages. So I’ve decided to document it here for my future reference.
- Go to System Settings->Keyboard Layout.
- Select the Layouts tab and click Options.
- Under Compose key position, select the key you want to use as the compose-key.
Wikipedia has a nice table summarizing the compose-key sequences.
View Failed Login Attempts – lastb
The lastb command can be used to list failed login attempts. By default it displays a nice table of all failed attempts including the username, time and host the attempt had originated from.
sudo lastb -w | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | uniq | less
The -w tells lastb to display full username. The cut, sort and uniq turn the output of lastb to sorted list that contains each user name only once.
When I ran it recently on my server I found some interesting results. Nobody tried in the last fortnight to login with root but they did try with r00t, root2, root3, roottest, rootuser and a bunch of similar ones. There were a bunch of generic users such as admin, support, test, user, sales and surprising number of software related ones: wordpress, wp, stunnel, mysql, moodle, mongodb, minecraft etc.
Another useful command is
$ sudo lastb -f /var/log/btmp.1 -w -i | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq --count | sort -nr | less
which lists hosts sorted by the number of failed attempts originated from each host.
Overall in the last two weeks my server experienced more that 3300 failed login attempts using more than 800 unique usernames. Fortunately, as my server only allows public-key authentication via ssh all those attempts are pretty futile.