Vincent's Weblog

Removing shadow from MacOS screenshots

When making a screenshot of a window in macos, with a simple command you can disable/enable the shadow:

#disable
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true ; killall SystemUIServer
#enable
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false ; killall SystemUIServer

I regularly toggle this off when I need to …

Making Proxmox templates

I use proxmox in my homelab to run VM's, but by default you have to install each VM from scratch which can be annoying. Luckily Proxmox has a feature where you can make templates and use Cloud-Init to set them up.

Downloading the base image

First, we need to download …

App defaults

Inspired by hemisphericviews episode 097 I made a list of my default apps.

  • 📨 Mail Client: Apple's mail client, or the fastmail web client on my school laptop.
  • 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail
  • 📝 Notes: Apple's notes.app or a bunch of txt files
  • ✅ To-Do: issues in a git repo (on a private forgejo …

Installing Apache, PHP and MySQL on FreeBSD

In a previous post I went over installing FreeBSD, in this post I will install a "FAMP" stack (FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

Installing Apache

First we will install Apache:

pkg install apache24
sysrc apache24_enable="YES"
service apache24 start
service apache24 status

When we browse to our webpage, we will …

Using jails in FreeBSD

FreeBSD's jails are pretty powerful tools, in this post I will go over how they can be used.

Types of Jails

there are 3 main types of jails:

  • Thick jails
  • Thin Jails
  • Linux Jails

Thick jails are the "traditional" form of jails in FreeBSD, they contain a complete copy of …

UFW Basics

On Debian and Ubuntu systems, the easiest way to configure a firewall is with UFW - The Uncomplicated FireWall.

Installing and enabling

sudo apt install ufw
sudo ufw enable

The default configuration is to deny all incoming traffic

Listing rules

sudo ufw status

Allowing a service

To enable a service, either …

Installing FreeBSD

For a long time, I've noticed "FreeBSD" as an option when spinning up a VM at various cloud providers, but I've never played with it. I decided I should just spin up a VM on my Proxmox machine in my homelab and explore FreeBSD. In this post, I'll go over …

Configuring NAT on Proxmox

Sometimes you might want to save some IP addresses by placing a few servers behind a nat. This can be done by masquerading with iptables.

You can add a section like this in /etc/network/interfaces

auto vmbr1
iface vmbr1 inet static
        address  10.0.0.1/24
        bridge-ports …

Configuring ProFTPD on Debian12

ProFTPD is a FTP server that is very versatile. It allows for virtual users, supports SFTP and more. In this post (that I'll mostly have for my own future reference) I'll go over the process of configuring ProFTPd with: - TLS support - Virtual user support

Installing

I'll be using a debian …

Pelican and Jenkins

I've always maintained my site using Jekyll, but it never worked quite well when I moved computers since I kept having dependency problems between one environment to the next. This is why I decided to look for an alternative.

I looked at a few options, like Wordpress, but I decided …