Technology Solutions for Everyday Folks

Matt Zaske Online Blog

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Well, the time has come...to shut down post comments. Presumably for good.

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Cleaning Up Old Mistakes Part Deux: Leveraging Includes

This post is the second of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part one discusses cleaning up Git repos based on permissions faux pas.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Using centralized/standard "includes" for path variables and eliminating passwords from committed code.

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Cleaning Up Old Mistakes: Git Repos With Nested Accounts

This post is the first of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part Deux is also available.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Git repos used in production in which nested/disparate accounts run code.

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A Twitter Bot for Dad Jokes

About a month ago, I discovered this gem of a tweet:

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My Personal Git Cheat Sheet

I've used a number of various Git cheatsheets over the years, usually duing a moment of "how do I do __ again?" and sometimes during a moment of panic like "Shit! Undo that commit!"

Recently, I (finally) "removed my training wheels" and uninstalled the UI client I had for Git, for two reasons:

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Git-ting the hang of Hooks

Several months ago I made the decision to finally use Git to manage a more complex "legacy" web application project that I inherited over a decade ago and continue to maintain. Years ago when migrating the web application to a new hosting stack, I ported the development/test and production sites into their own Git repositories.

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Signing Git Commits: Chasing the "Verified" Stamp

I've been working on projects lately that actually involve writing more code than I have in a while...and so I'm using Git/GitHub with greater frequency than I have in some time.

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Implementing DMARC: Adjusting SPF Records

It's been a couple of months since I last wrote about implementing DMARC and what comes next (review and adjustment). So I figured this would be a good time to document a few changes I've made based on the reporting data received so far.

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2020: An Energy Year in Review

Now that I've had a chance to really look at the data from our 2020 electric use, in a modified format from what I've written about before, I thought I'd wrap up with an overview of our overall electric use during a most unusual year.

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My First Twitter Bot: A Journey into Twitter's API

Dancing Robot

Sometime around Thanksgiving/November 2020, I formalized the idea that I would actually build a Twitter bot for the sake of novelty and as an experiment/learning exercise. One night at suppertime, we discussed what might be cool as a bot and those ideas are still on the list as possibilities for the future.

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Exporting Legacy/Archival Emails with Google Apps

At work, we've had a number of folks retire over the last 18 months, and a number of those folks are holders of some significant institutional knowledge and memories. Recently I had the opportunity to work with one of these individuals as they prepared to both hand off information to others, which led me to recall several conversations I've had with my Libraries/archives friends about preserving the "right" subsets of digital messages such as email.

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My Incremental Certbot Panacea

I've written about Certbot more than any other topic in the last 24 months or so, in part because it's been an interesting adventure for me both in helping to demystify SSL certificates, but also because it's been an evolving and incremental process to Make It Better.

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Interruptions and Intentionality

Snip of cartoon saying 'Hey, so I just sent you an email about that thing.'

Interruptions: they're everywhere.

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Implementing DMARC for Active Domains: Policy & Review

This is the second post in a two-part series to implement DMARC controls for actively-used domains, where this post focuses on creating and reviewing/adjusting your DMARC policy and controls.

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Implementing DMARC for Active Domains: Configuring Prerequisites

As a follow-up from my previous post about implementing DMARC controls for unused/alias domains (those not used for actively sending messages), I wanted to write a bit about how to implement basic DMARC controls for those domains actively used to send emails.

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Armchair Pair Programming

This past Friday, somewhat out of the blue, I was pinged by a friend about helping him work through implementing what I'd done to date with Certbot...with the additional twist of his own unique configuration challenges.

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Implementing DMARC on Alias Domains

A few weeks ago I crossed a tweet with some simple instructions for securing your "unused" email domains, specifically the few bits required to implement DMARC controls to prevent Bad Folks from using your domains to send spam emails.

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That's a [House] Wrap!

Charlie the cat enjoying the outdoor smells.

As I'd eluded in a post earlier this summer, we had some major home projects completed this year. As of the end of October, 2020, they're all functionally complete. We only await the delivery and installation of a few missing pieces of window jamb extensions and casing, and a "rainy day" for the contractor to spend a couple quick hours installing.

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Automating Certbot: A Recap of My Journey

Long winding road

Over the last two months, I've shared what amounts to a four-part "series" of posts walking through my journey of using Certbot for SSL certificate management, with the primary challenge being not having the traditional root-level access on the web server. Those posts are, in order:

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Certbot in Manual Mode with Script Hooks

If you've been following along in the mini series, I've gone over the details of using Certbot in manual mode, then bolting some simple scripts together to improve the process of generating and managing certs, all done with a bit of magic thanks to our old friend

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Improving Manual Certbot Domain Validation

In my second post about using Certbot in manual mode, I address some of the 'pain points' from the first post: namely the process of scripting together some of the bits to create/renew a certificate and otherwise requiring fewer individual commands be entered (or remembered).

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Moving to Certbot with Let's Encrypt

This is the first post in a short series of posts about automating what one can in an environment that might not support full-automation with Certbot and Let's Encrypt.

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Analog Reading

I read and consume a lot of material every day. I love it, and I love how available this material can be to everyone (God Bless the Internet).

What I have been remarkably remiss at over the last year or so, though, is regular old analog reading. The stuff of books, that is.

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Quick Tests of WQL Queries

Recently I was working on a clean-up/improvement project in the MEMCM (SCCM) console which required some WQL query work and updates. In particular, I was fiddling with some collection queries to segment some areas for a process improvement project coming up. That's intentionally vague, because the 'why' in this case doesn't really matter. What does matter is that I needed WQL to give me proper results.

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A Good, Long Conversation

Throughout the pandemic I've tried to keep in contact with friends via different mechanisms. One of those venues is Slack, where one friend and I have gotten into this "habit" of sorts where we do some sort of video call (Slack, Zoom, etc.) that ends up lasting several hours. These come up every six weeks or so (in addition to more regular banter via Slack); not often enough to be burdensome, but often enough to be meaningful.

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Speaker @ MMSMOA

I'm speaking at MMSMOA, May 5-9, 2024!

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Speaker @ BrainStorm

I was a speaker at BrainStorm K20 Wisconsin Dells, March 10-12, 2024!

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Speaker @ MMS

I was a speaker at MMS Miami Beach, October 29-November 1, 2023

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