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free https
Wednesday, May 28 2025
At work today I found myself having to administer a Windows server via Remote Desktop that forbade the use of copy and paste. Fortunately, though, I had a clever workaround. Some years ago I'd had a similar problem and developed a solution for it: a web-based clipboard system that allows me to save text into a database to be retrieved elsewhere. This system also allows for the movement of files. I didn't realize how much work it had saved me until I talked to our sysadmin, who had just retrieved me a configuration file from a similarly-configured computer, and it had taken him an hour of stupid little steps. I told he could use my system in the future if he wanted to.
But then later I tried using my clipboard system on a different server and found that I couldn't get to it because it was being served via http, not https. Apparently you can now lock down a computer so that it can no longer view the good old unencrypted web that I grew up on.
This reminded me that ChatGPT had mentioned a service called Let's Encrypt that provides SSL certificates for free. I'd assumed one always had to pay for SSL certificates, and that was one of the reasons I'd never bothered to install them on my personal websites, but evidently that is no longer the case. Perhaps Let's Encrypt is something of a charity. In any case, I looked into how easy it would be to have Let's Encrypt install a free SSL certificate on RandomSprocket.com, and found that it was extremely easy. I just had to enter some incantations in the shell, and something called Certbot did all the work. After that, when I navigated to my sites on RandomSprocket.com, they were all being served in https without any certificate errors!
Later this evening, though, just before bed, I noticed that all of the data from the cabin was seven hours stale. At first I thought something bad had happened to the Moxee watchdog, the Moxee hotspot, or perhaps even the cabin as a whole. But then I realized that seven hours was about how long ago that I'd run Certbot. It turned out that Certbot had reconfigured the Apache web server so that all http traffic was being redirected to https. But, since none of the ESP8266s are capable of https, that wasn't going to work. Once I re-enabled http, data started flowing immediately.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Today at lunch after another dull monolog about golf, the king of the lunchroom court turned to me and asked if I am an amateur mushroom hunter. I said that indeed I was, and he then excitedly started talking about mushrooms, including what sounded like an edible Amanita that one of his friends likes to harvest and eat. "I would never eat anything that looks like that," I said. I then suggested that the king add chanterelles to his small list of mushrooms he knows enough to collect and eat. (The others being chicken of the woods, morels, and puffballs.) I was in the midst of telling my amazing laughing jim tale from back in college, but of course the king interrupted me to say something far less entertaining and I never got back to it.
Back home on Hurley Mountain, I managed to convince both dogs to join me on a walk down the Stick Trail, though Neville got ahold of a bone that Charlotte had been carrying that had once belonged to Crazy Dave's dogs and decided to lie in the trail and chew on it while Charlotte and I continued southward. Eventually I climbed the escarpment to the west near its longest grade and then headed back homeward (northward). But instead of going out to the Farm Road, I went down from the highlands using on an extremely steep slope just southwest of the Chamomile Wall. I'd gathered a few good stones to add to it, and I ended up working on it for twenty minutes or more. Meanwhile Charlotte had gone home and was barking out on the east deck. When I next saw Neville, his fur was drenched, suggesting he'd actually gone down the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and had a soak in the puddle between it and the Farm Road.
I proceeded to make my usual spaghetti dinner, this time cooking broccoli with the pasta. But somehow I burned the tofu when I was frying it with the mushrooms and onions. It was still edible, but only sort of. Gretchen and I watched not just Jeopardy! but an episode of Shark Tank, the one where Lori wears a crazy-looking blond wig and a couple guys pitch an amazing idea: dog beds for humans. (Some of the sharks clearly didn't get it, perhaps reflecting their remnant feelings of inadequacy — they didn't want to lie around in no dog bed! — but Lori and Mark did.)
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