SwissMountainLeader

securing nginx with “Let’s Encrypt”

We’ve been routinely using secure websites for a while now. That’s mostly because our B&B website hosts a booking system and I want that to be secure. We have some other drivers though (in no particular order):

we want the WordPress admin pages to be protected and not send passwords in plain text over HTTP.

we have an admin system for bookings that should ideally be protected

we have web server…

The day Google broke the internet

Predictions of panic, public disorder, looting, the collapse of society and rumours of the 7 Dwarfs of the Apocalypse have so far seemed slightly overblown. The headline is that Google Chrome browser 51 will no longer support HTTP/2.0 from many servers that are running it. This is on all platforms, my Mac and Chromebook are having the same problems. If you fire up the Chrome developer tool, and…

fast is never fast enough, when 100ms a long time

So, I’m sat looking at the PINGDOM website speed test and thinking “780ms … from Sweden… that’s not bad” but there’s this thing….

I thought PINGDOM used HTTP/2, I’m wrong but I did think that. Which made the amount of SSL setup this is doing seem quite high. There’s SSL connection establishment overhead for multiple objects which, historically, has always been an objection to SSL web pages. And,…

is my CDN broken? image optimisation and website speed

How long?

Sometimes, just sometimes, you can overthink a thing. Like, how long is a piece of string? The string in question being how to optimise web page delivery.  After some extensive analysis of web page traffic we’ve figured out that most of our users aren’t in the same place, or even the same country, and they’re not using the same browser, or even the same operating system. In fact, it…

Back when I bought the MacBook there were options to have SSD or SSHD’s (Hybrid drives or solid-state hybrid drives) for any extra arm and leg. Although, given I bought the MacBook from Apple as a reconditioned unit there was a limited choice. SSD storage is still expensive compared to a hard disk, I can buy a 1.0TB hard disk for as little as 66.- CHF, but the price of SSD has dropped. I was able to find a SAMSUNG SSD 850 EVO 1.0TB for 289.- CHF and I had a 15.- CHF voucher which knocked a bit more off.

Swapping the hard disk is a fairly simple task if you’re comfortable taking laptops apart, formatting disks and re-installing operating systems. I appreciate terming that simple is relative so it’s not something to embark on unless you’re comfortable with all the steps. There are a few guides on the net so I don’t think it’s worth repeating them. The one from Crucial is pretty good for example, MacBook Pro 13″ Unibody Mid 2012 SSD Installation. It’s worth pointing out that is particularly relevant as their SSD requires a spacer since it’s smaller than the shipped one. I was able to find a spacer here in Switzerland from Microspot who seem to stock most things and who also provided the actual SSD.

I had already created some installation media as I detailed in my other post (re-install OSX) so I just rebooted and installed OSX, fired up Google Drive to pull my data back, used Time Machine to pull back my Itunes and image libraries and that was all running again.

has it worked?

I’d say so! Here’s the Black Magic benchmark from the original, through a simple re-install with my final install on the SSD.

Basically, it’s gone from 40-50MB/s to around 500MB/S which is probably a little faster than I expected. This translates into faster times to do real work:

Initial boot time, from power up to being to do meaningful work: 29secs (reinstall: 46secs) (original disk: 3min 23secs)

Adobe Photoshop CC 2016: 5secs (reinstall: 18secs) (original disk: 1min 20secs)

Adobe LightRoom: 9secs (reinstall: 30secs) (original disk: 1min 25secs)

So, we’ll mark that up as a success I think.

Reinstall OSX – spring cleaning part two

There’s plenty of guides on how to re-install OSX on the internet, it’s fairly pointless to simply repeat them. However generally, but not always, the guides assume you are re-installing on the original disk. This assumes that the original factory installed recovery partition is there to use, if not (on newer hardware) you can fall back to using Internet recovery. I don’t want to do that, I…

Slow Macbook pro – spring cleaning part one

As my previous posts have said, I’ve been using a Chromebook quite a lot recently and it’s really my main machine for most tasks. There’re a few things I still do on my Macbook Pro, most notably Adobe LightRoom and Photoshop. I also use the Garmin Basecamp software to manage my two GPS devices, there’s not a reasonable alternative to this, the track manager and editing are still the most usable…

Of course, no visit to the hospice would be complete without seeing the a trip to the museum and dog centre at Martigny for coffee and to see some of the St Bernard puppies!

Quechua Bionnassay 32L Ski Touring / winter rucksack

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I work on the principle that you can never have too many rucksacks. Carrying things up and down a mountain can be hard work and having the right rucksack…

Thursday we spent on Monts-Chevreuils skiing out to Les Moulins following great snow most of the way down the mountain. That might have been enough but we came back to Leysin, put the skins on again and climbed another 400m for a fondue at the Les Fers Restaurant. The fondue was great but the ski down in the dark with fresh powder was quite exceptional. We got right back to the door of the chalet having skied the road through the village which, late at night and in a snowstorm, hadn’t been cleared.

Friday my plan had been to climb Walighürli which turned out very good, it was a clear sunny day and the snow was excellent most of the way down. The last few metres to the car were scrappy but high up we had mostly untouched snow for several hundred metres across the meadows. Really, about as good as it could possibly be.

So, great skiing, great company!

As a footnote, I’ve been climbing this week on Gecko glueless skins, my old G3 Alpinists were getting a bit tired and I didn’t feel it was worth re-glueing them. I’d wondered about switching to glueless and had read David George of Pistehors.com. I can say after a few thousand metres this week that I’m a convert. Grip and glide are just fine but general handling is much better. I took Julie’s skins off in the dark outside Les Fers and, even after only a few days, her (really nice) G3 Alpinists seemed like old tech’. I’ll see how they hold up!

There seemed a reasonable number of people skiing onto Walighürli, some arriving by helicopter, but the only people we saw all day were some ice fisherman. The ice actually looked pretty precarious to us but I assume there’s some expertise in knowing what’s safe or not!

On the mountain, it was great as usual. We dropped down into Italy and explored one of the side valleys the next day. Over Christmas the St Bernard dog kennels had ten new puppies so we called by to see five of them.

The route itself was still holding pretty good snow making it a good day out and a good birthday (I hope!) for one of the clients I was with. certainly the summit of Pointe d’Arpille made a great picnic spot.