In the current theme, Mainroad, Disqus Comments has been replaced by Cactus Comments. Cactus is a more modern approach to commenting and is open source. The server uses the matrix protocol, another modern innovation to be discussed in a future article. If you comment ON this post, your comment is immediately posted and visible to you. You are welcome to test it. If abused I do have the option of moderation before posting.

With seven articles having been posted to my blog, it was time for a backup. I had been using the rpi-clone utility. But since the last backup I moved the boot media from an SD Card to a thumb drive. To my surprise the second USB 3 port on the Pi was not recognized. I decided for the purpose of the blog, that I would keep the thumb drive and use an alternative backup method.

A recent sale on Amazon had significant price reductions on NAS drives by Synology, Western Digital and Seagate. Buyers should be suspicious about bargain prices. In this case, the fact is that hard disk drives (HDD) are quickly becoming obsolete in favor of solid state drives (SSD). The cost of SSD’s has literally plummeted in recent months. An NAS drive offers several benefits. First, it is that second location for all the digital stuff that you don’t want to lose and should be backed up.

Traditionally l, Linux is often referred to as the geek’s OS. It still is, but it has evolved to the point where many distros are quite usable by average people as a general purpose OS’s. I find it somewhat annoying that some technical sites such as distrowatch.com refer to these OS’s as beginners OS’s. The word beginner implies the start of a journey leading to more advanced concepts. Indeed, go to the homepages of Ubuntu, Zorin, Elementary and others and notice that they do not refer to themselves as beginner .

Hugo’s developers collaborate on Github. Developers of other static site generators also use Github. The theme writers use Github as well. If it seems to you that Github is a special place for software development, then you are correct. All was well until last year (2020) when Microsoft purchased Github. It is a common business practice that one way to eliminate a competitor is to make them a generous purchase offer that they are not likely to refuse.

This blog would not be possible without web hosting. There are numerous providers that will host websites for a monthly fee of around $10 (USD). All of them serve the website. A static website does no need a server. It simply requires a “parking spot” with a URL. Some people have tried using their “public” areas on their cloud accounts as parking spots. Dropbox did not like this practice and took action to prevent it, i.

In this article several methods of file sharing over the local network (LAN) will be discussed. While it assumes a Raspberry Pi user, the methods are applicable to other computers as well. On all computers connected to a LAN Lt is essential to know that computer’s local IP address. On a Windows box bring up a command prompt with cmd and enter ipconfig. This should show both your local and Internet IP’s.

Updating the firmware The Pi developers call the bootloader “EEPROM”. It is a critical component of the Pi’s architecture and should periodically updated to the current release. This is accomplished with a single command as follows: sudo rpi-eeprom-update This will return a screen informing you that the EEPROM is either up to date or there is an update available. obviously if your Pi is up to date, do nothing. Otherwise, if an update is available, repeat the command as follows: sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -a The two parameters will result in the download of the update.

What is a Raspberry Pi computer? The Raspberry Pi computer is a tiny computer about the size of a deck of playing cards. It is very inexpensive, priced below $100 USD. The various models come with NO internal storage. The internal firmware is only a bootloader. The user downloads an OS image, burns it to a micro SD card. The image is bootable and the remaining space after the OS is the capacity of the SD card.

This website was built and is now updated with Hugo. The task was not easy, mostly due to errors in the Hugo quickstart tutorial. After installation, the tutorial advises to download a theme and go through a couple of steps that result in the theme being placed in the site’s themes folder with the specific name of the theme. Then that name is entered into the config.toml file with an echo command.