TZIN

  • Historical Timezones and Computing

    Many moons ago, my colleague B and I worked on and supported a patient registration form management system for a health-care group. There was one tech-support case that had us stumped. An older gent in his 70s was admitted on his birthday, and his calculated age was off by one. We were stumped. Until I…

  • Npgsql 8.0, Entity Framework Core and JSON POCOs

    Npgsql 8.0 introduced NativeAOT and trimming support (hooray!), which necessitated explicit opt-ins to some dynamic coding practices that are incompatible with NativeAOT/trimming. One of these is JSON POCO mapping which I use quite heavily in some of my projects (boo! hiss!) As mentioned, though, it is opt-in via NpgsqlDataSourceBuilder introduced in Npgsql 7.0 or the…

  • Using DevilBox for WordPress Development on WSL2 on Windows

    Or: pretending I’m still a *nix wizard. It’s been a while since I moved from MacOS back to Windows, and it’s also been a while since I worked on any WordPress sites. I like Sage. Unfortunately, both Lando and Laragon are not supported scenarios, and so I went back to the Devilbox, which I used…

  • LibreELEC 10, Raspberry Pi and Crashing

    So, I recently switched my HTPC Raspberry Pi 3 from RetroPie, on which I only use Kodi anyway, to LibreELEC 10. Immediately started experiencing crashing just browsing, especially when viewing TV shows. I’m using it in conjunction with a Jellyfin server, so I thought it might have been caused by the Jellyfin addon for Kodi.…

  • Working with Ancient Network Equipment (or: Getting Around Old SSL and TLS Versions)

    The Problem At work, I recently had to dig out an old NETGEAR SRX5308 ProSAFE Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall (that’s a mouthful) for a very specific scenario (try shotgunning four LTE modems). Problem was, no modern browser can access the web management page due to the ancient SSLv3 standard without changes to the…

  • Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool Outdated As Hell

    Last release was in 2017. It fails with modern Java installations. “A Java Exception has occurred.” Pretty opaque message. Installing an old version of Java is probably not a good idea, security-wise. So what to do? Here’s how I solved it. Pretty poor show, Ubiquiti.

  • The Perfect HTPC?

    Update 2021/02/12Unfortunately, it’s not a suitable HTPC. It doesn’t support CEC, and that will rule it out for many people. The fan noise is also a bit of a concern, but I find that at typical TV viewing it didn’t bother me. It is, however, a very good emulation machine. Chuwi is currently running a…

  • Android Emulators and Hyper-V for fun and profit

    There are various reasons to enable Hyper-V on Windows 10 installs especially for developers. Tools like Docker and WSL 2 require it. One hurdle though, especially for gamers like myself, is that the Android emulators designed for gaming were not compatible with Hyper-V. The official Android emulator does support Hyper-V, but it is pretty awkward…

  • Email in Castle Monorail 2.0

    Castle Monorail has been my web framework of choice for some years now. I’ve been using the obsolete RenderEmailAndSend method as that was how it is done in the sample code. Monorail 2.0 uses Core 1.2 which features an integrated email sender component, and the old sample code does not work any more since Castle.Components.Common.EmailSender.Message…

  • Verisign SSL Certs with Apache2

    Just spent a couple of hours wrestling with this… So apparently Verisign certs do not work with mod_ssl because they are packed in the PKCS#7 format. For my own future reference: Source: Using a Verisign SSL Certificate with mod-ssl.