Tech Spot

  It's 2023 and I still keep my Hotmail email address around, mainly to use when I need to create an account for some app or web site. I have my Gmail account set up to sync the emails - Google's spam filters are far better than any other free email service I've used.  Recently, I've gotten emails with the subject line "Microsoft account unusual sign-in activity".  The links in the email do go to account.microsoft.com so I looked into it.  Each time, it shows the location of the activity as coming from Ireland (I assure you, I'm nowhere near Ireland!).  After I clicked "This wasn't me" on several occasions, I realized Gmail was no longer syncing my Hotmail emails.  When I went to Gmail's "Accounts and Import" section, it displayed a warning that emails couldn't sync for that account. In that section, I had to re-enter my Hotmail credentials and then go to https://account.live.com/activity to click "This was me" to ...

I recently started using Grav for a separate blog unrelated to this one.  It's been great so far, with an easier learning curve than other self-hosted CMSes (though not easier than a default Blogger/Blogspot or Wordpress site).  One thing that was strange to me was that there doesn't seem to be a default way to add a piece of JS code such as a Google Analytics tag to your Grav site using the Admin console. It's not readily apparent, but there are some plug-ins you can install such as "Custom JS", which I prefer to the Google Analytics plug-ins for future proofing and ease of adding other JS code snippets as needed. From the Grav Admin console, go to Plugins > + Add > (search for "custom" in the filter box) and then install it.  Note, the plug-in automatically has a <script> tag before and </script> tag after. So if you are adding a code snippet that already starts with <script> and ends with </script> then you will need to r...

I accidentally installed Debian 12 with GNOME on a "headless" virtual machine with only 10 GB of disk space with a low-cost hosting provider.  I would only ever need to SSH into such a VM. Rather than re-installing again I tried to see if I could remove the GNOME/X11 components.  Various Reddit, Stackexchange and Superuser threads gave some commands but they were far from complete, at least for the newer Debian 11 and 12 versions. Using "sudo apt list --installed" showed what else was remaining after I ran "sudo apt remove gnome". Some of these I looked up online to see if they truly were graphical only. Warning: Do not just run "sudo apt remove gnome*" or "sudo apt remove x11*".  One of these ended up doing a cascade uninstall of sudo itself!  Fortunately I had the root password and could re-install it, but if you don't, I'd try these commands separately.   sudo apt remove totem sudo apt remove xauth sudo apt remov...