About #

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a widely used data format for exchanging information between web clients and servers. However, JSON data is often densely packed, making it difficult to read when viewing it directly in the terminal. Fortunately, Linux offers several tools to help pretty-print JSON files, making them easier to read and analyze. In this post, we’ll explore various methods for formatting JSON in the Linux terminal, including jq, Python’s built-in JSON tool, and a custom Bash script for environments where installing new tools is not possible.

The project is in Work in Progress (WIP) state. A lot of functionality is still missing.

About #

gomirror is a CLI mirror ranker that its main goal is to rank or find the best mirror for a Linux distribution. Although it can be extended to be used as a more general ranker for mirrors/servers.

It is build with usability, extensibility, and performance in mind. It can quickly make thousands of requests with the power of Goroutines, to all servers in parallel. Its inputs and outputs are JSON-modeled, to allow for defined but extensible input data and results. As a CLI tool it will display any results in the standard output by default, but with the correct flag it can also output them in various formats. You can find the expected inputs/outputs for the various supported formats in the inputs/in.template.* and outputs/out.template.* directories respectively.

About #

GitHub hosts millions of open-source projects, many of which provide compiled binaries for various platforms as part of their releases. When you’re looking to download the latest version of a project, you might wonder how to do it efficiently from the command line, without manually navigating the GitHub website. Fortunately, GitHub provides an API that allows you to access release information programmatically. In this post, we’ll explore how to download the latest release of any GitHub project from the command line, using curl and utilizing the GitHub API.

Introduction #

A full catalog and review of some analytics tools, that are a more privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. The tools are divided into the following categories:

• Free Cloud-Hosted
• Free Self-Hosted
• Paid (Cloud or Self Hosted)

All the chosen tools should have the following characteristics:

• Privacy Focused (No IP logging, Fingerprinting, Tracking, etc)
• GDPR compliant
• Open Source (Preferably but not hard criteria)
• Offer good statistics
• User-friendly interface (UI/UX)

Reasons for choosing an alternative #

It was a struggle for me to find and choose a different analytics service, but I knew I had to do it if I want to be more respectful of the people that visit my website and try to create a more private and secure internet. The state of the internet is not gonna change from our small websites, but I believe it is important if there is a more private choice available, we do not have a reason to ignore it.

The Amazon Web Services world is an entire beast on its own, and I believe some knowledge around it should be useful to all tech related roles, from programmers to DevOps and system administrators. I am recently trying to explore AWS, so I will try to document my process along the way.

In this post I have gathered the steps for signing-up with AWS and the first configurations to make to your account before even starting an instance or a service. It is best to follow the official AWS documentation for each step (as it will be always up to date), but the main actions to do should remain pretty much the same.

Introduction #

This is a guide to help you sign your Git commits in an open source project, in order to verify that the owner of the submitted code is you and only you.

Git enables us to use whatever email and username we want when doing a git commit. This can be easily used for malicious purposes, as anyone can pretend to be another person when commiting a piece of code. So, if we use signed commits we are showing that we are who we say we are, and if we are using GitHub we will see a green Verified tag in every signed commit we push.

In the system administrator world, a large part of the work is to monitor the servers and all systems in infrastructure to make sure of their correct operation and to prevent any kind of malfunction or problems.

One protocol that allows devices to share their status with a monitoring server is SNMP, which is widely used in the networking world, in switches, routers, firewalls, or access points. SNMP’s main benefit is that, if the device supports it, it is very easy to remotely query them for their status and even change their configuration.

Pi-hole® is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content, without installing any client-side software.

We will use Pi-hole as our DNS server in our local network in order to block ads on all devices. It is important for Pi-hole to be run on a device or server that is constantly running, as we will configure our router to point to this device for any DNS query. So without it running we will not be able to access any webpage.

SUI is a startpage for your server and / or new tab page. It offers some similar functionalities as Homer.

We can use this app in order to have a homepage for all our services, apps and links of our server into one place, and edit only some json files for the content.

This guide assumes, that Docker and Docker Compose is already installed in your system.

Run Using Docker #

Clone the repository in your system and navigate into it:

About #

An simple URL shortener RESTful web service API written in Go, using the net/http package for the server, the HttpRouter for the router and Bolt DB for the database.

The Stoplight service was used to design and document the REST API. See below for the API Documentation

The API service is deployed on Heroku, and you can access it on url-shortener-thanoskoutr.herokuapp.com.

Because the Heroku Free plan is no longer available from November 28, 2022, the above link does not work. I wish to deploy the API in a Heroku free alternative service in the future.