Benjamin Bryan

$5 DigitalOcean, Vultr & Lightsail Benchmarks

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Amazon Lightsail has entered the VPS market, competing directly with DigitalOcean and Vultr.  I for one welcome more competition in the $5 cloud server space.  I wanted to see how they perform so I spun up 24 cloud servers, 8 for each provider and ran some benchmarks. $5 Cloud Server Providers Compared DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Amazon … Read more

Best Gifts for Computer Hackers 2016

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Looking for a Christmas gift idea for your computer geek?  Here’s a short gift guide with a few ideas I think would make great gifts.  Unlike a lot of other top gift idea lists written by non-tech people just to make a sale, I’m actually a developer and these are the sort of things that … Read more

Ben’s Phone Guide (2016 edition)

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Phones depreciate in value fast, their useful life is less than their lifespan.  Not because old phones don’t work anymore.  But because manufacturers stop providing security updates after about 3 years (at best!) What If I Told You a Hacker Can Take over Your Phone with One Text… And You Don’t Even Have to Open … Read more

How to Encrypt Your Email

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So, you want to hide your email from the NSA’s prying eyes?  It’s impossible… but here are some steps you can use to make it harder. This isn’t theoretical.  The NSA has and does intercept this traffic. Common Points of NSA Interception The NSA has unlimited resources to compromise your communications.  You’re not going to stop … Read more

ZFS Dataset Hierarchy | Data Hoarder Edition

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ZFS is flexible and will let you name and organize datasets however you choose–but before you start building datasets there’s some ways to make management easier in the long term.  I’ve found the following convention works well for me.  It’s not “the” way by any means, but I hope you will find it helpful, I … Read more

Intranet SSL Certificates Using Let’s Encrypt | DNS-01

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Let’s Encrypt is an excellent service offering the ability to generate free SSL certs.  The way it normally works is using http-01 challenge…  to respond to the Let’s Encrypt challenge the client (typically Certbot) puts an answer in the webroot.  Let’s Encrypt makes an http request and if it finds the response to the challenge … Read more

PSD is not my favourite file format

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This programmer does not like the PSD File Format:

/*

At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.

PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.

Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.

Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

PSD is not my favourite file format.

*/

— code comment from https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108