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The LCD-XC are a closed version of the LCD-X headphones. They are planar magnetic headphones which can be found on eBay for $800-1000 and new cost about $1300 or so. The M17 is a digital audio player (DAP) cable of many features, acting as a balanced headphone DAC or unbalanced depending upon your configuration, and can also act as a digital audio interface via coaxial SPDIF to an external source. It has a micro-SD card slot and runs Android. While the Android firmware can’t be updated and support has fallen off for this older DAP, it still runs Spotify and has wifi and bluetooth too… Read More »The Audeze LCD-XC and FiiO M17 Review

I’ve been eyeing US Mobile for a while now. I’ve had AT&T, Verizon, Consumer Cellular, Cricket Wireless, and I’ve also wondered about Visible. However, US Mobile stands out at the top of my list for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) in the United States. They have a deal for lines with their annual plan for $235/year that includes unlimited hotspot using tethering with very, very generous caps. The only catch is, be careful for being flagged for abuse on their network, especially with speed tests. However, if you use their service respectfully, for the price, it simply can’t be beat. You won’t find a referral… Read More »U.S. Mobile For the Win!

Everyone uses gmail now. I remember when gmail was in beta and its limited access meant, unless they had available slots in their program, you couldn’t get a gmail account. Gmail was world class in spam filtering technology, but now, the free version is it’s weak point. 1) It enables bots to create spam accounts that abuse it, having significantly reduced it’s credibility as a mail service, and 2) Hi-jacked email accounts are rampant, 3) The free version is loaded with ads that are cleverly disguised as spam, defeating the whole purpose of preventing spam in the first place. You could pay for a gmail… Read More »Why you shouldn’t use GMail

By default, QEMU installs graphical tools under Gnome. You can administer a virtual machine through Gnome from a console. However, if you’re remotely accessing the machine through RDP this can prove problematic because of RDP woes. With VNC, and CLI commands, you can control a QEMU VM completely over SSH and still access the graphical console. Setting up a network bridge Just remember that when setting up the bridge, your physical interface has to be down with nothing tied to it. This means physically accessing the machine unless you have multiple network cards connected. Multiple NICs is handy for firewalls on internet connected systems. CLI… Read More »A guide to QEMU for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

I’m in a program right now for therapy for my health, and I thought I would write about laptops today. In particular, nobody really talks much about cheap technology except for nostalgia purposes or because they need to for a logistics reason (so to speak) because of legacy hardware that needs to be supported for expensive projects or so. However, sometimes cheap technology is also disposable. An expensive workstation laptop might be fine for telecommuting in safe places, but if I want to walk around sketchy areas of town and take my hotspot with me for internet or walk around places I haven’t been before… Read More »The disposable “survival” laptop

Webmin by default allows root access to a system, and by default allows terminal access to the root user. Care should be taken to properly setup Webmin to disable the root user. Enable Two-Factor Authentication TOTP authentication can be enabled without installing any extra modules. Enable it by allowing TOTP Authentication in the Webmin configuration. Then, for each user enable TOTP authentication separately and save the resulting QR code (authentication key) into a password manager like Bitwarden or Microsoft authenticator. Make sure to test your two factor authentication for each user before you continue. Root should probably have this setup before you disable it. Disable… Read More »A note on securing Webmin

Since I use nginx and varnish with WordPress (and lighttpd as the webserver), I was interested in using nginx to remove the index.php “directory” that is added to WordPress URLs. Perhaps this can be disabled with a more appropriate WordPress configuration, however since I didn’t want to mess with that, I did it myself. The code is “simple,” however it took a few hours to figure out. if ($uri ~ index.php){ set $redirect_allow 1;}if ($uri !~ ((154)|(admin-ajax.php))){ set $redirect_allow 1$redirect_allow;}if ($redirect_allow = 11){ rewrite ^\/(index.php)\/(.*)$ /$2 redirect;}if ($uri !~ ((!((\/)!(.+))))|(\/index.php\/(.)$)|(\/(wp-admin)(.))|(\/(wp-content)(.))|(\/(wp-login)(.))|(\/(wp-includes)(.*)))# If the URL is not empty, or it doesn’t contain index.php or or doesn’t contain… Read More »Removing index.php from WordPress URLs with nginx

This guide will show you how to setup an interface will be routed through Wireguard (which is then routed through your primary internet connection). With DHCP, you can auto-assign IP addresses even though the gateway has a static IP address. You can even setup IPv6 without NAT so your IPv6 addresses are public facing and routed IP addresses, which means connections to IPv6 addresses from your VPS will be able to connect directly to the systems on your VPN interface. By extension, this can be translated into a VLAN, however that will not be shown in this guide. Let’s get started. Setup your BuyVM Slice… Read More »OPNsense: A wireguard interface and BuyVM

Pittsburgh DNS is announced today. Check out the page here. Thanks for your interest.