Yaroslav de la Peña Smirnov's weblog

A little fun with Zoom 2020-12-20

Since the beginning of the Orwellian nightmare that befell upon us this year, many of us have been forced to not only fundamentally change the way that we go about our lives and interact with other people, but also to use platforms for video communications that not only are proprietary, but are also of very dubious origin and quality. Well, either that, or fail academically (for those still in university, like myself), or professionally (for those being forced to use this software at work). That, however, doesn't mean that you cannot make use of the situation and have a little fun.

The indentation Red Pill 2020-10-11

For the last several years I had been using spaces for indentation. I had decided to settle upon that method of indentation without much thought, just based on what I observed was the most popular choice. Well, that, and also the fact that I was writing mostly Python back then, which greatly influenced my decision. Recently however, I decided to switch to using tabs - at least for my own projects - and I am going to layout here the reasons why I concluded tabs to be The Superior indentation method.

Goodbye OpenVPN, hello Wireguard 2020-06-06

I had been using OpenVPN for quite some time for my internet privacy purposes. However, I recently decided to switch to Wireguard. I am going to layout the reason why I chose to do it, and how I setup the Wireguard VPN for my purposes. I had been meaning to write about this for some time. Unfortunately, I have been quite busy finishing my last year of university.

Website refactor 2020-05-07

A couple of months ago I had decided to completely refactor my website and blog. Finally I have done so, and even though I think it still needs some work, I am much more happy with it now than before.

Rethinking my weblog 2020-03-07

It's been a while since I have posted anything on my weblog. I will be laying out some of the reasons for this, as well as what I've been meaning to do with my site and blog going forward.

Packaging and distributing python apps and modules 2019-01-31

There may come a time after some hacking and playing around with python that you feel like the piece of code you just created needs to be shared with the world, and so you might be thinking "Man, wouldn't it be sweet if anyone could install my app/module just by typing pip install stuffimade'. Well, it is actually easier than you might think (it certainly was in my case).

Intro to Linux and the Bash command line, pt III 2019-01-11

New year, new post. In this third, and most probably final part of these tutorial/guide series I will be mentioning some useful commands and programs usually present in most standard linux installations. I will be talking especially about programs/commands to manipulate text output from programs and files. I will also talk a little bit about regular expressions, a powerful tool to perform searches inside text strings.

Intro to Linux and the Bash command line, pt II 2018-12-31

So the year is coming to an end, and I didn't follow up on the first part of these mini tutorial/guide/introduction. Might as well end the year on a good note and write at least one post this last month.

Intro to Linux and the Bash command line 2018-11-05

Recently I decided to introduce a friend of mine to the wonderful world of Linux, and like when someone moves to a completely new town, you have to help that friend get around town and learn about how things work in this new town, where are all the places of interest, etc. And so it is, in someway, when someone decides to make the move to a new OS, they have to get used to the new environment and make new habits, especially regarding Linux. Therefore, I decided to write this tutorial for my friend, and anybody who decided to try Linux, and want to learn to use more effectively, that is, with a higher level of skill than an average user.

Setting up your own VPN 2018-11-02

There are many reasons why you would want to use a VPN, especially in this day and age. The major one would be to securely and more privately surf the web, but that is far from the only reason. I for one use it as well to be able to set up a remote network with my desktop PC while I'm away from home, so that I can access all of my files through SSH. There are a ton of other reasons as to why a VPN could be useful, but that is not the topic of this post, rather I will be writing here about to set up your own VPN (yes your own!) on a VPS, or any other kind of linux server for that matter, using OpenVPN.

Yaroslav's weblog