Configuring CouchDB 1.6.1 with LetsEncrypt free SSL certificate on Debian 8 (jessie)

Enable jessie-backports, if not already enabled on your system. As described here: echo deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list > /dev/null aptitude update Install certbot as described here: sudo aptitude install certbot -t jessie-backports Configure a web server, so certbot can communicate with the outside world. I use lighttpd. sudo aptitude install lighttpd …

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Installing Docker 1.12 in Debian 9 (stretch)

Debian ships with an old version of Docker, and the official installation instructions for Docker on Debian are a bit dubious (run an entirely untrusted shell script as root! yay!), not to mention error-prone, and result in a completely non-functional Docker installation on Debian, thanks to aufs being deprecated. So these instructions should make it …

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Praise for Let’s Encrypt — Free, automated SSL certificates

After a few weeks of not hacking one of my hobby projects, I decided to get back to it today, only to discover that the SSL certificate guarding it had expired. Being just a hobby project, it wasn’t important, but it was annoying. But before I went to buy another $9.99 SSL certificate for the …

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Getting Anki 2.0 to work with Debian stretch

Recent updates to Debian testing (aka stretch) have rendered Anki broken, with the following error message at startup: $ anki Traceback (most recent call last): File “/usr/bin/anki”, line 7, in <module> import aqt File “/usr/share/anki/aqt/__init__.py”, line 12, in <module> from aqt.qt import * File “/usr/share/anki/aqt/qt.py”, line 22, in <module> from PyQt4.QtWebKit import QWebPage, QWebView, QWebSettings …

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Configuring CouchDB for HTTPS only

Getting CouchDB to work via HTTPS is fairly well documented. Disabling HTTP turned out to be the harder part to figure out. Enabling HTTPS The official documentation (here is actually incomplete (or more likely, simply outdated). But it’s still a pretty straight forward process. Edit your local.ini to include the following: [daemons] httpsd = {couch_httpd, …

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How to install CouchDB 1.6.1 on Debian 8.2 (jessie)

First, I must give credit where it is due. These instructions are based on Matteo Mattei’s earlier article Install CouchDB 1.6.x on Debian 7 (Wheezy), but with some important changes. The commands below assume you have sudo properly configured on your system, and that you are running as a standard user. If you’re doing everything …

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List of French Minimal Pairs

EDIT: If you’re just interested in the list of French Minimal pairs, you can go straight there at my new site MinimalPairs.net. I’m in the early stages of learning French. I recently read Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner, which I highly recommend to anyone trying …

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Creating a Debian package of a Go project

Go is all the rage these days, and I decided to give it a try. And as my company uses Debian packages to distribute our software, I need to package my new Go-written project for Debian. Mark Stapelberg has done a lot of leg work to find the best (and official!) ways of packaging Go …

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Windows 7 + TrueCrypt 7.1a and Debian wheezy + encryption dual-boot with GRUB2

Getting Windows 7 (or Windows 8 or Windows Vista) with TrueCrypt to play nicely with GRUB2 is quite a chore. Although, after 2 days of fighting, I finally found a simple solution, thanks to the README file that comes with grub2tc. Unfortunately, grub2tc didn’t actually work for me, but their docs did! Here’s the step-by-step …

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First impressions of Linux on the Sony Vaio Z

My company just bought me a new laptop, and they let me choose which model I wanted, as long as the price didn’t get too insane. I had two main goals while shopping: Ultra-portable I do a fair amount of traveling, so I wanted something small. As the former owner of a 12″ PowerBook, as …

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