Assorted Nerdery

Blog posts - hastily written with poor grammar.

I’m an engineer living in a small city north of Boston with my wife, two kids and two cats.

My webdesign-fu is pretty weak, but I’m aiming for a adequately readable experience with minimal cruft. I recently discovered the Zen Hugo theme and have modified it here. Any suggestions are very welcome!

Vizio Privacy Policies

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I recently came into possession of a nice new Vizio Smart TV. It’s pretty nice - 1080p, Netflix, etc. As part of the process for connecting the television to the internet, they made you agree to a number of different license agreements and privacy policies. In a fit of UX mastery, they did not show the privacy and license agreements on the television, instead instructing you to type a long URL into your web browser and reading the policies there. Nevertheless, they insisted upon your agreement before connecting to the Internet.

Notmuch of mail a setup Part 2 - notmuch and Emacs

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In my previous post on this topic, I tried to detail the way that I fetch and send email using my laptop using a combination of mbsync and systemd. This has been working extremely well – it runs in the background and does the right thing when I am connected to the Internet. The only issue with this setup is that I’ll occasionally need to clear a lockfile out of the .msmtp-queue directory. This is quite rare, however.

New SSL Certificate

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

My SSL certificate expired on 11/1. I replaced it with a new
certificate today. The SHA256 fingerprint of the new certificate is:

27:88:83:BF:22:D3:55:62:1C:2D:26:B2:8B:C9:AD:32:E3:C2:A6:BD:B7:C8:41:53:F9:38:D8:C6:AA:63:88:B1

This is going to expire in February 2016. I will likely replace it
with one from [Let's Encrypt](https://www.letsencrypt.org) by then.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJWOUgKAAoJEKtJwDCg2HMhXj0H/icGRxNn7cnlFUlEZ4Y5hujc
LlBOigcCT/A7HVmTSYq++7icj2J/XOw/CL2wVNok1oMe4KVT6VmLH3rs68BSzusB
arGSFAz4Lu1MPPmBlmp2L3l2Gc8eWPzvfDS9S1pD0tO63ISVGAzj0rMwtMlogPV2
ePd/lOIuICU8tUpWxNRt8LLrsOfMNYzuTV+5a6NVQS8OUpck/k3x6cYCpujXhXi3
APTT2o7s0VbvZP60iHZfMNzg6dQHEuywhmwmQuyyAy5LbefLyd+M8lN+4b/yzfw5
XVUIHx1Y/k5h5x9IFP//o6Y4fCRgMs0xhIAGWo0JZrwd8aQijjQx22qy+jBvfdg=
=WjLO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Getting Rid of Comments

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I’m disabling comments on this blog as of today. I’ve only received a small handful of comments in the year or so that this has been up – certainly not enough to justify the user needing to download over 1 megabyte of javascript from Disqus when they load the page.

Feel free to email me - john at johnbyrnes.info if you have any comment.

Getting the T-Mobile Jet (Huawei 366) USB Modem to work in Linux

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I recently purchased a cheap T-mobile broadband USB stick for use with my Debian Linux laptop. The device is the T-Mobile Jet 2.0 – a rebranded Huawei UMG366.

After putting the SIM card in, I noticed that NetworkManager was unable to see the card. Some DuckDuckGo-ing led me to this Linux Mint forum post.

Apparently these sticks show up as a USB hard drive when you plug them in. This lets them include the drivers with the stick. Ejecting the drive activates the internet connection. You can use a piece of software called usb\\_modeswitch to change the device mode.