Technology

For many years, I have used backup software made called Retrospect Backup.

As an aside, backing up your computer files is very important. These days we store many things on computers – important documents, irreplaceable photographs, emails, software licences, and so on. The originals are increasingly in the cloud somewhere, but not always. You should always have a strategy for what to do if your laptop hard drive dies, you are infected with some ransomware that locks you out of your files, or whatever it is.

Back in 2019, I wrote a couple of blog posts outlining how to set up a web server called lighttpd to run some simple websites. Those two posts were called Setting up Lighttpd for Simple Sites and Adding SSL / https to lighttpd.

This post updates those, for a few reasons:

Over the past couple of years, I've used quite a few bottom-budget VPS providers (as in a few dollars per month for a completely unmanaged VPS). Some were successful and others not. Read my review of 8 such providers: AlphaVPS, BuyVM, DediRock, Hostbrr, InterServer, RamNode, RareCloud, Servarica

So, I set up a Wireguard server to use as a personal VPN.

I created a client (peer) on my laptop that allowed my laptop (Fedora) to connect to my Wireguard server. All worked fine.

I then installed the Wireguard app on my Android phone, and created a new connection, choosing the “from scratch” option. The fields on the Android screen matched the entries in the configuration file on my Linux laptop, so it seemed intuitive what to put into each box.

Some AlmaLinux systems I run were failing to tell me that a reboot was required (using dnf needs-restarting -r) after a kernel update. This post looks at why that was, and how to solve that particular problem.

Just a quick post in case this helps someone.

My PC (Fedora 42) has just updated to KDE Plasma 6.4.

Immediately, every time I locked the session (Super key + L), an error appeared on the screen

The screen locker is broken and unlocking it is not possible anymore. In order to unlock it, switch to a virtual terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F1), log in to your account and execute the command:

This is the third post in a series. I wrote about my experiences moving this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, and then zeroed in on theming the site using Radix as a base theme. Out of the box, Radix subthemes don't generate sidebar regions for block placement, something many websites want.

As a way to illustrate theme development using Radix, and as a recipe for a common site-building requirement, this post will walk through how to add sidebars to a Radix subtheme.

I've finally updated this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This post runs through my experience of this upgrade, including explaining why I bypassed Drupal 8 and 9, and why I didn't upgrade straight to the latest Drupal 11. Overall, I'm very positive about running it on Drupal 10.

For a long time, this website has had a sidebar giving details of one book (at random) on my bookshelf. That sidebar linked to a page giving the covers of every book on my bookshelf, from where you could get to another page giving a sortable table of covers, titles and authors.

I've temporarily removed that, but plan to put it back.

I've removed it for two reasons.