Justin Cardoza

WordPress has been a wonderful CMS for my website these past few years. I’ve enjoyed working with it, I’ve learned a ton from it, and I’ve developed a deep respect for its power. For the right website, it’s a fantastic publishing tool, and I’m sure it will be for years to come. However, at least for this website, my time with it has sadly come to an end. I just don’t need most of the features it provides on my small personal blog/portfolio, and it’s been time to upgrade to a better hosting situation for a while.

I haven’t done much with my website lately; apart from security updates, I’ve been too overwhelmed with work and life to write much this year. And what a year it’s been already! That’s not why I’m writing this post though.

I got the notification to update to WordPress 5.5 earlier this week, so I logged in, did the update, and glanced at a few pages to make sure everything worked okay. Usually it does, but this time, some of the images in my posts were looking pretty gnarly:

Raspberry Pi computers are great for so many low-power applications, hence my obsession with them, and one of the popular projects I’ve read about is making one into a security camera. Home security and automation are topics I’m very interested in, so I went ahead and built a security camera to try the concept out. I decided to use a Pi Zero W for its small size and particularly low power requirements, and I was also able to find what I’m pretty sure is the original version of the Raspberry Pi camera on Amazon for less than $9.

For a couple of months I’ve been getting a trickle of badly-put-together (but frustratingly well-spoofed) extortion spam at my main website e-mail address.

I recently got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4 to add to my network thanks to Pimoroni, and of course it wouldn’t be complete without a cooling solution. Pimoroni also offers a heatsink case which both protects and passively cools the computer. Since the Pi 4 runs hotter than previous versions, I wanted to make sure it would have plenty of cooling, and this case was exactly what I was looking for. It gives 10-15 degrees of passive cooling according to their testing!

Yes, the custom lightbox plugin I developed for my website’s photos page is finally officially released! It is lightweight, functional, nice-looking (in my opinion at least), and it even does a little trickery when the page loads to make it a bit harder for visitors to download copies of your images.

This week I set up a pi-hole on my home network, and apart from a couple of minor hiccups, it has been very nice so far. If you haven’t heard of it, pi-hole is software that handles DNS requests and blocks online ads for every device on your home network, even on devices which won’t normally let you install a plugin like Adblock Plus (like smart TVs and un-rooted phones). The installation guide was nice and simple, and even setting up a DNS-over-HTTPS client was pretty straightforward.

For some time I’ve been noticing a strange issue on my website: every once in a while, a file named error_log would appear in a subdirectory of my document root, visible to anyone who knew to look for it. It seems that whenever there was a PHP error (for example, when a vulnerability probe tried to access a theme file), PHP would dump the error message to a file in that same directory.

I have to change my proxy settings pretty regularly for work, so earlier this week I researched how to streamline that process a bit. The first thing I found was how to create a shortcut to a particular settings page. It’s relatively easy if you know the URI for the page you want, and there are plenty of lists out there, including this one at Windows Ten Forums. Just create a shortcut and put the URI of the page you want as the location. In this case I’m going to point the shortcut at “ms-settings:network-proxy”

Now that my website redesign is complete-ish, or at least launched, I’m starting to work on cleaning up and releasing some of the custom code I wrote to make it happen. This is one of those pieces: a tiny, lightweight plugin that removes unneeded stuff from the head section of each page to make everything a little more lightweight, improving loading times, bandwidth usage, and site security.