My new Thinkpad has a Quectel EM05-G modem. For some reason it refused to connect, even though it showed up in Gnome settings on Ubuntu 22.10. I checked with mmcli -m 0 and it said sim missing as its state.

After some Googling it appeared the modem ships in …

I was faced with a firewall denying access to the outside world using ssh. All I had was http/https access via a proxy server which required authentication. I had an Ubuntu jump host outside the network connected to the internet with a free 443 port. I tried accessing that …

I came across a situation where it would be nice for a Python class to have a method which works for both the class and its instances, and when called in an instance context, to know on which instance it was invoked. Python does not support this directly, but as …

Create default profile and set editing mode to 'vi':

ipython profile create
echo "c.TerminalInteractiveShell.editing_mode = 'vi'" \
  >>~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py

To keep an ssh connection with a tunnel for port forwarding  up reliably we can use the autossh command by Carson Harding. If the connection drops, autossh will restart it. Here's a quick recipe to forward local port 33306 to a remote MySQL host listening on port 3306:

# Install autossh …

PostgreSQL provides us two very powerful features which are helpful with unit testing: transactional DDL and transaction savepoints. In this article I will show you how to use those with Flask-SQLAlchemy unit tests.

Transactional DDL means you can create tables inside a transaction, run tests against them, and roll back …

In a post a couple of years ago I gave an example on how to configure an Ubuntu 12.04 server to authenticate to Active Directory. Things used to be hard back then. Now we have the realmd realm enrollment manager to do the hard work of joining the host …

Here's how to create a site-to-site VPN between StrongSwan and SonicWall. This has been tested with Ubuntu 14.04 and StrongSwan 5.1.2, and SonicWall with SonicOS 5.9 at the other end.

Here's how to install the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service on your own server. It can be used to geocode and reverse geocode addresses and map coordinates. You will also get a web interface which loads map tiles from openstreetmap.org while doing geocoding requests using your own server.

I was faced …

Here's an example of how to remove every *.pyc file from every commit in Git history. It is adapted from this Git help page.