I recently refurbished an old IBM ThinkPad z60t to make it usable and suitable for donation. This involved two areas of work: Installing Linux Upgrading the firmware Upgrading the firmware The ThinkPad has two different firmware upgrades: BIOS Embedded Controller ThinkWiki’s list is pretty comprehensive, and pointed me to BIOS 1.24 and EC 1.18. Because …
Author Archives: paulschreiber
Cosmo’s power pancakes, metric edition
I’m a huge fan of Carla Lalli’s Music’s pancakes (aka Bin It to Win It Pancakes aka Cosmo’s Power Pancakes). We make them a bunch, and have fed them to appreciative family and friends. Carla initially shared the recipe in a Bon Appetit video from April 2017. The recipe was approcumented by a sketchy recipe …
HOWTO fix ActiveRecord migration NoMethodError in Rails 5.2
Ruby on Rails 5.2 changed the method signature for ActiveRecord::Migrator.migrate(). The old signature was this: The new signature is this: Suppose you had some Rails 5.1 code like so: If you ran it in Rails 5.2, you would get this error: In Rails 5.2, you would write:
Journalism job boards
AAJA AIR (audio) Hacks/Hackers job email INN Inside the Newsroom IRE JournalismJobs JournalismNext Mandy Hofmockel jobs email MediaBistro NABJ NAHJ NAJA ONA Career Center Poynter’s Media Jobs Connection Public Media Jobs ONA SAJA Source Mandy Hofmockel wrote up a good summary of job resources for Poynter.
HOWTO move WordPress from MyISAM to InnoDB
When importing an old WordPress database, it may have tables in MyISAM. You can convert them to InndoDB in MySQL like so: If you run into errors like this: It’s because of the SQL mode. You need to remove NO_ZERO_DATE from the mode. First, see what SQL mode you have set: Then, set it to …
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Journalism Resources
Education and Training Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) Poynter Tow Center for Digital Journalism Publications Columbia Journalism Review Nieman Lab PressThink Source News Organizations Pulitzer Center Professional Associations and Consortia American Society of Journalists and Authors Asian American Journalists Association Association of Health Care Journalists Bureau Local (UK) International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) International …
HOWTO configure DNS on Ubuntu 19.04
As of Ubuntu 19.04, you no longer use /etc/resolv.conf for DNS servers. Instead, edit /etc/systemd/resolved.conf and add DNS=8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 (for example). Not this list must be space-delimited and not comma-delimited. Then, run systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service to apply your changes.
Handy WordPress commands
In VIP Go’s mu-plugins, to update everything:git pull && git submodule update –recursive –remote With VVV, after setting up a site, to enable Query Monitor:wp user add-cap wordpress view_query_monitor To flush memcache:echo ‘flush_all’ | nc localhost 11211
Password rotation is dumb
Many organizations have policies requiring you to change your passwords every 90 days. These policies are dumb, and make security worse. The following material should help you fight back against this nonsense. You don’t have to believe Paul Schreiber, but you should believe NIST, the FTC and the UK’s NSCS. NIST In 2016, the National …
How to register a Kindle DX in 2018
I recently repaired a Kindle DX for a friend. As part of that, I reset it to factory defaults. When I went to register it so it would connect to his Amazon Account, I received the following error: Your Kindle is unable to connect at this time. Please try again later. If the problem persists, …