MacOS has a few locations that start programs up on boot (called agents and daemons in macOS). If your Mac seems slower, this might be a cause, a bunch of background services running for programs you don’t use often enough. There are also programs that install themselves everywhere and just deleting the application will not remove them. We will walk through all the directories that an application can hide in.

I have quite a few wordpress sites under management, and updating the plugins and themes can get quite tedious. This script will update all of them automatically (you will need SSH and CRON access for this) to whatever time-frame you set it to. The trick is to use “wp-cli” which is a command line toolset for WordPress that lets you do just about anything (you can even reset admin passwords so be careful who has access to this stuff).

I have been on an email cleanse lately, so going back and deleting old emails that there is no reason to keep. Over the years I have been quite good at labeling anything that is keep-worthy, but a few can slip through the cracks. Here is a simple search you can run inside your gmail box that shows all the emails you can look through and delete.

Search for this to find anything that doesn’t have a label,  isn’t in trash, your inbox nor drafts. The new Gmail search should return 100 results, so look through and see any you may have missed to label.

If your not familiar with tor, check out https://www.torproject.org/ to get more information. Its a secure proxy system that basically anonymizes your ip address.

You can install the Tor client and connect or a super easy way is to run your own proxy and just have traffic flow through it. Don’t have to start up anything, its always running if you want to use it.

The Beaglebone black is a perfect device to run a Tor proxy on your home network. Once its setup, you can leave it plugged in via ethernet, a USB power supply and its always available. It makes a decent Ubuntu Linux server for development purposes too (although it compiles a little slow).  For a temporary website or learning a programming language its a great deal. We will also have a shortcut on your desktop that you can click on to make chrome go into incognito mode, and connect to our proxy with just one click.

There is a decently easy way to make your online accounts more secure (as in logging into them). Its still up to the site owners to keep your data safe, but thats another day.

The method is called 2-factor authentication. A username and password is the first part, and a randomly generated code is the second part. So if someone gets ahold of your password, the random code will stop them from logging in (unless of course they steal the device giving you the codes as well, but we can only do so much).