JAMES

LOPER

I have a zest for 3d printing, which is why I’ve created a new 3d Printer called the Lemontron.

Here is the song & dance I do every time I start a new Ubuntu server. Nice cheat sheet for me to refer back to.

When you enable Expose daemon on tcp://localhost:2375 without TLS in Docker Desktop, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you could actually connect to the Docker Daemon from another machine in your network. But why?

Life360, a company that claims its product is a “family safety service” has been selling location data on its 31 million customers, including kids, since 2016.

Yet another impossible to remember thing!

Need to generate a PDF using the Arial font? Ubuntu doesn’t bundle proprietary software to avoid licensing issues, however you can easily install the Microsoft suite of fonts with one simple command.

When developing a React Native app with a meteor backend, you may be tempted to make use of the meteor client found on npm. However, that is not the best way!

I’m always facing the problem of calculating the distance between two points on the surface of the Earth. Most of my readers will already be aware of the Haversine formula, so let’s dive in and see how many earth shattering speed enhancements we can make.

For DigitalOcean’s 2021 hackathon I set out to create a dashboard for my Emissions station in Duluth, GA.

While hosted mongodb solutions exist, they aren’t for everyone. Scaling, security, and reliability is just one tutorial away. In this fairly deep tutorial we cover everything from the initial installation to optional steps such as SSL and a secondary replica. This guide is targeted for Ubuntu 20.

When mds_stores takes 100% of cpu it means it’s scanning and indexing a directory with a lot of files in it. In programming, typically node_modules is the culprit.

It’s no secret I love NGINX. I use it in all my projects.

I love mup and have been using it for years. It’s the simplest way to get your meteor project deployed. However, when it comes to using binaries, things get complicated. Suddenly, creating your own deployment script becomes the less complicated option.

Have you ever struggled to do something that sounded so simple such as connecting to a god forsaken wifi network on Ubuntu Server? Well me too and here is how you do it. What’s more is if you basically don’t install anything you keep the server clean and wifi and lan can both work at the same time without hassle.

mjpg-streamer is good and simple software that does no processing on the video, it just queries the capture device for a specific resolution and passes it through to the web. I like it.

I recently had to make a Node script that would make use of MozJPEG. I will show you how to install it on both a development laptop and on the Ubuntu server the product will ultimately be deployed to.

I’ve set up quite a few Docker hosts, so I always wind up doing a variation of repetitive tasks. Mix and match these bad boys to get a very functional host.

Often times, an application will provide the option to input a proxy url, but it won’t accept anything beyond a simple HTTP proxy, making it next to useless. So I made a node script to serve up a proxy on localhost to forward the request to the real proxy.

Normally without sufficient access to the router, it’s not possible to expose your computer to the internet so it can act as a server. This is often the case, you have a powerful computer behind internet you have no control over. Here I will show the best way to circumvent that via a gateway server.

Meteor is one of the few frameworks to make use of the oplog feature in mongodb. It’s quite a feat of engineering and the way it is done uses it heavily. It’s very important to set it up correctly.

Ubuntu always greets you with a wordy “message of the day” blurb and a small ad for Livepatch. All these blurbs are generated by shell scripts, and you can customize them by entering the motd directory.

You probably think the hallmark of a bad-ass business is the ability to ruthlessly prioritize things that move the needle. You’re also infatuated with the idea of iterating your existing features to acheive the ideal UX.

Although card processing errors can be a black box of caveats, some rules are known.

Center crop to a square, reorient, and resize, callback as base64. Don't think I can make this any smaller.

Well I searched long and hard for great cross-device modals, but came up short. I decided to whip up my own, and I have a good solution. But first let's go over what makes a perfect modal.

I figured out how to override the default reset password handler and send the password reset email via CustomerIO.

Meteor projects using Blaze have a gigantic payload of backward compatible jQuery. Every site should be serving this from a CDN, rather than embedding it. To switch to jQuery 3.4.0, first place the CDN reference in your head tag. Most visitors should have this file in their local cache, makiing loading it instant.

Follow this massive guide to run a world-class server on the cheap. If you've never even set up a server before, don't fret as it takes about 30 mins to follow this crash course. I recommend to follow the steps down to the popular modules and skim the rest if you're curious. Google if you get stuck. Good luck!

An always-online server running a full Ubuntu Desktop can be useful for many reasons. I usually use DigitalOcean but the popular France-based host OVH seems perfect for this scenario.

When I needed to share a database between app #1 and app #2, the solution was astonishingly hard to accomplish. Please let me know if there's a better way to do this.

As long as we’ve been making software, we’ve been screwing up its deadlines. In the 1960’s, early programmers began to find that the harder they tried to deliver polished work on time, the more miserably they failed. Frederick Brooks of IBM famously discovered that placing more programmers on delayed projects only added more delays.

Make the leanest possible newsletter server newsletter.com in minutes.

If you want to hack your phone, to truly make it your own, you need to get an Android.

The most frustrating thing I have encountered as a developer is definitely history. This is my solution, which is based on the JavaScript History API intended to allow developers to make persistent URL's in web apps using the browser's native history stack.