I feel like some of my computer-related problems become so much easier to solve when I realize that everything is just code, and code can be adjusted/fixed.
Today I am working on adding functionality on my website for users to add comments. some people have already done this, but I decided to not go with their way and just use the bare-bones github issues functionality without much interfacing.
Last week, I made a post about my project for command-line encryption and decrpytion of Outlook emails using a smart card. A day before I worked on that project, I was actually working on another, tangentially related project relating to encryption and openssl.
At my current workplace, emails are frequently frequently encrypted/decrypted in Microsoft Outlook, using a smart card that is issued to every employee. At work, we primarily use Windows, and either the default Microsoft authentication tools or middleware such as ActivClient are used in order to interface with our smart cards / smart card readers. Until I started this project yesterday, I had only ever used GUI applications in order to do anything related to my smartcard.
OpenCV (open computer vision) is a c++ project devoted to computer vision applications. For this weekend project, I was specifically looking into how it could be used in an Android application. To start off, I read through the OpenCV android tutorials located here and here. Unfortunately, these tutorials referenced an older version of Android Studio… (nowadays, there’s a fancy new Android studio that even has a dark mode!)… so I had to try my best to translate outdated instructions towards the new stuff.
Doing more work with Ubuntu on windows. I accidentally overwrote my Ubuntu on Windows installation, deleting all of my Linux files! Oh well. Since I’m starting from scratch, I am working on getting things back to working again, starting with Jekyll and GitHub/Gitlab.
Wow, haven’t updated blog in like two years. Right now I am trying to install gedit on the “Ubuntu on Windows” feature of Windows 10. I was able to get it installed with “sudo apt-get install gedit,” but it still wasn’t working correctly… something about a gconf file not working. I wasn’t able to change any of my preferences! After googling the problem for about two hours, I think my issue is that I haven’t installed gnome yet! I guess that’s a required thing, considering that gedit is a gnome application.
I’m trying to make jekyll on github pages work nicely with my website host, and it’s rather confusing. I thought I had it all figured out yesterday, but I decided to do something else so I’ve been working on that for the past few hours. I want the jekyll site to appear at www.xoid.us, but I want all my old stuff to appear somewhere, like old.xoid.us. But in the process of doing that, I suddenly was unable to access my cpanel, or any non-jekyll part of my site! Pinging it did not work! But wait! If I check the status of the website on sites like site24x7.com, it shows that it works. I just tried opening the site on my phone’s 4G internet connection, and it works. So I think that the hosting company may have blocked my IP address for some reason… So anyways, I finished up the DNS editing on my phone, and now I think everything works as I expected!
All right, so I made my website. Took me forever to figure out how to do all sorts of things… First, I learned how to use git. Then, I learned how to install jekyll and get it to display a website on localhost. After that, I had to figure out how to redirect the github URL to xoid.us, and that was the worst part, because I never knew what my A and CNAME changes did, because of caching and stuff! Well anyways, it turned out it worked. Up until this point I had been doing everything in linux! I had originally started in windows, with the Github GUI and Powershell, but I was so confused and lost that I just started from scratch by learning from the git reference website online. The tutorial had linux commands in their examples so I used the linux partition on my laptop. That turned out pretty well.
So anyways, after I was getting nowhere with the CNAME record stuff, I rebooted and switched back to windows, and checked xoid.us in the browser…. and it worked!! After that, I made a short CV draft page and started adding a blog thing. I have noticed that the powershell and the github GUI is a lot easier to use now that I kind of understand what git is.
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