Hacker   Traveler   Gamer   Foodie   Outdoorsman

Adding Twitter to your Tumblr Blog

I’ve recently started using a new Tumblr theme called Optica. It’s awesome, it’s minimalistic, it looks exactly like what I want it to look; but it doesn’t allow me to display Tweets. Bummer! But wait, there must be a way we can hack it in, right? We can always hack the theme’s HTML directly but then we will lose any sort of improvements that happen naturally when the author updates it. So let’s hack it in by (ab)using your blog’s description! Create a embedded-timeline widget using your Twitter account. Edit your Tumblr blog’s theme. Append a custom <div/> element to your blog’s description. For example:
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Securing Your Synology DSM with VPN

Bugs and exploits are a natural part of this world. The Synolocker ransomware was recently running rampant and hacking into Synology devices running DSM 4.3 and below. It did this by identifying your device if ports 5000 or 5001 were exposed and then exploiting a bug to implant itself. The only fool-proof solution to preventing being exploited permanently is to be paranoid. Shut down all unnecessary Synology services and never expose any ports to the web. This is far from a convenient solution though. For example, I still want to share access to my Synology device because it hosts a few websites for my family. This required me to find a good balance between security and availability. I decided that the best way to do this was to install the Synology VPN service and use a L2TP/IPSec VPN. I would only expose ports 80, 443 for web serving and ports 1701, 500, and 4500 for VPN. The...
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A hard drive has two states: dead and dying

A hard drive has two states: dead and dying—My oldest hard drive is giving its last death rattle in the form of ever more common clicks. It is still working… but I’m pretty sure it’s days are numbered. I’ve backed up all the data from the clicker drive and now started an experiment. I’ve placed this drive and another semi-clicker into a ReFS mirrored storage space on my Windows 8 desktop. Write performance immediately tanked from 140MBps to 45MBps similar to what people have complained about before but otherwise I haven’t noticed any major problems. Will my data survive? I’m planning on adding another working drive to the array just to hedge my bets…