Declaration of VAR

Wells Fargo and 2FA via one-time code generator

As you might know, I have an account at Wells Fargo bank. A very nice bank, from my experience, but there were some issues along the way, most of which I was hoping to avoid having in future by using a two-factor authentication (2FA) with one-time code generator:

But I was amused to learn that it seems to be not possible.

XBMC/Kodi remote control application

There is this great piece of software - XBMC/Kodi media player. I’ll write a separate article about that one, but today I want to show you a remote control application for it, which I’ve created for myself.

Beauty, innit.

Tower has switched to subscription

So, Tower has now also switched to the subscription model, meaning that you cannot just purchase it once, now it wants to suck money out of you on the constant basis.

So we already have a text editor with subscription model, and now there is a subscription-based GUI for Git. What next? Ping utility? Volume control? Clock widget?

Needless to say that I bought the application just a couple of months before the switch.

It’s amazing how I get more and more signs pointing that I made a mistake having purchased this or that software. Sometimes it feels like I should’ve just kept stealing it via torrent-trackers.

Meanwhile, I deleted Tower (even though I can legally use the non-subscription version I have a license for) and installed SourceTree. And I recommend you to do the same.

Тинькофф повысил плату за SMS

Получил тут на днях письмо от Тинькоффа, где помимо прочего они сообщили о повышении платы за SMS-оповещения с 39 до 59 рублей в месяц:

Я тут же подумал, как хорошо что я эту доилку отключил ещё год назад. Push-оповещения в приложении сообщают всё то же самое и не стоят ни копейки.

Но когда я отключал эти SMS-оповещения, помню мне всё заливали про то как сильно я рискую безопасностью своих денег, ведь в случае кражи моей карты эти SMS-оповещения помогут оперативно минимизировать ущерб!

Ну, опуская момент с тем, что бесплатные push-оповещения помогут ровно так же, хочу показать вам живой пример, когда у чувака украли карту, и будучи оповещённым через SMS о новых операциях по ней, которых он не совершал, чувак в тот же день обратился в банк и оспорил эти операции, однако денег ему банк ни фига не вернул.

Понятно, что чувак сам себе злой буратино, раз держал значительную сумму денег на карте вместо накопительного счёта, но всё-таки - зачем тогда вообще платить за эти SMS-оповещения?

Android forever

So, Android 9 Pie was released recently, and I went to update the Pixel C tablet I have.

Surprisingly, I did not get the update:

I went to google (hah) it and guess what I found: Pixel C is discontinued!

Google, are you fucking serious? The tablet was released in December 2015, and you discontinued it in December 2017 already, so just 2 years later? That’s hilarious beyond any reach. I would expect that from HTC (hello, you pieces of shit!) or some Xiaomi, but Google itself? Yeah, purchase an Android device - make an investment into the future.

Also note how it was done: no announcement, it just disappeared from the store. And only after the question was asked, they “[…] confirmed […] that the end of sale also represents the end of life for the device”.

Anyway, let’s see how things are with Apple’s iPad Air:

• released: 01.11.2013
• today: 10.08.2018 17.09.2018 (5 years later)
• latest iOS as of today: 11.4.1 12.0
• latest supported iOS on the device: 11.4.1 12.0

Oh well.

Multiple websites at one server with Apache

For quite a few years I had two VDS instances, each one hosting a different website. And I always wanted to host both websites at the same server, so I could reduce my costs and save time maintaining two servers instead of one. Yesterday I finally read some manual and did it.

It’s actually not that complicated, but countless articles and manuals on the subject were making it to look so for me.

Server-side analytics in .NET Core

Google Analytics is a good tool for analyzing your website audience, but it uses client-side code (JS), which is not always reliable, because you don’t control what’s happening there, and users can simply disable GA scripts (web-browsers even start to block such tracking out-of-the-box).

More reliable way to analyze your visitors would be a server-side analytics.

Screenshot of an HTML page with JavaScript

Yes, it is possible to make a screenshot (create a canvas replica) of an HTML page (or rather of a selected node) on client-side using JavaScript.

And like everything in JS world, it is done via some library. This time it’s html2canvas.

A black reboot of Buffy

Buffy will be rebooted, fuck yes! But wait…

Midnight, Texas creator Monica Owusu-Breen has been tapped as writer

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF...

series reboot with black lead

Interacting with HTML from QML over WebChannel/WebSockets

Qt allows to create applications with so-called hybrid GUI - where you can mix native parts with HTML-based content. Such a mix even supports interaction between those native parts and HTML-side - by exposing QObjects via WebChannel and WebSockets.

And there are several ways of implementing that.