Don't you love open source and the capabilities it provides? My constant tinkering of my home automation has no end! The latest improvement is asking the system to play my favorite music. And I remembered that the advanced capabilities of using Rhasspy with Home Assistant with as little code as possible is not clear to everybody. So here is an explanation of how this works, and how I leveraged these capabilities to satisfy my music needs.
What do you do when your laptop breaks? If you're like me, you try to find a way to give it a second life. You either replace the broken parts, or, some times, you just imagine other ways to repurpose the laptop.
I often have multiple virtual machines for different purposes. Some I keep idle, some I destroy and recreate when needed, and some I use for actual work and they stay there forever.
Recently I ran out of space. It was not really bad planning on my side, I just didn't have more space to allocate at the moment. I got a new disk to dedicate just to VMs. The new disk is faster but it's not very big; if I'm not careful I will run out of space again.
I decided to move some virtual machines; just the ones that have a GUI. The server based ones that are not interactive can stay in the old and slightly slower disk.
Now that multi factor authentication is gaining ground I thought I would write a simple guide on how to secure administrative access with MFA on Linux systems. The solution is simple and based on Google Authenticator. The good thing with Google Authenticator is that it's a typical TOTP/HOTP solution and as such does not require any internet connectivity on either the server or the client. The configuration examples provided are more or less appropriate for openSUSE Leap 15 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
GDPR is supposed to let us take back control of our private data. In reality though many websites either don't allow that to happen through their selection of cookies, or constantly present to us the same requests until we accept the most invasive option. At the same time there is a known security risk related to every day broswing: browser - served malware, sometimes caused or enabled by the insane amount of 3rd party uncontrolled scripts that are served to us on the websites we visit. We need to find ways to browse securely and protecting our privacy as much as possible.