MoonPoint Support Logo

 

Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals - Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used ProductsAmazon Warehouse Deals



Advanced Search
February
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
2026
Months
FebMar
Apr May Jun
Jul Aug Sep
Oct Nov Dec


Sun, Feb 08, 2026 4:29 pm

Checking an NVMe drive's status in Ubuntu Linux with nvme-cli

You can check the health of a NVM Express (NVMe) drive on an Ubuntu Linux system using the nvme-cli command-line interface (CLI) application. The description for the package is as follows:

NVMe management command line interface

nvme-cli is a NVMe management command line interface. NVM Express™ (NVMe™) is a specification defining how host software communicates with non-volatile memory across a PCI Express® (PCIe®) bus. It is the industry standard for PCIe solid state drives (SSDs) in all form factors (U.2, M.2, AIC, EDSFF).

You can install nvme-cli throught the App Center on a Ubuntu Linux system.

[ More Info ]

[/os/unix/linux/ubuntu] permanent link

Fri, Feb 06, 2026 3:36 pm

Downloading YouTube videos on a Windows system with yt-dlp

YouTube recently changed its website (around January 4, 2026) so that programs that worked in the past for downloading YouTube videos, such as StreamFab, no longer work. My wife and I like to archive YouTube videos we find that have useful information we might wish to refer to again in the future, since we've sometimes found that when we try to view them again on YouTube that a channel where they were posted has disappeared along with all its videos. We have a YouTube premium subscription, which allows one to download videos, but they are stored in a blob file where they are not accessible to programs we use to view videos and there is no guarantee they will remain accessible even in YouTube's limited offline viewing method when a channel disappears. So we were very perturbed that YouTube has now made it very difficult to archive videos. StreamFab has been working very well for my wife and is easy to use, but I needed to look for an alternative for her. A couple of sites that still work that allow one to download YouTube videos are listed below, but downloading through those websites is slower and she found that for fairly large videos the downloads would fail.

https://ytdown.to/en2/
https://v6.www-y2mate.com/

Since I had WinPython, a free and open-source version of the Python programming language installed on a Windows laptop and she is using a Windows 11 system at the moment, though she wants to switch to Linux, I decided to try the yt-dlp Python program that allows one to download YouTube videos from a command-line interface (CLI).

[ More Info ]

[/video/youtube] permanent link

Mon, Feb 02, 2026 10:07 pm

Adding the capability to save webpages as a single file to Firefox

The Firefox web browser does not have the capability to save the contents of a webpage to a single file, such as an MHTML file, which is a web archive file format that allows one to save the HTML code, images etc. on a webpage into a single file. Though the capability is absent from Firefox, you can add the functionality of saving a page to a single file by installing Save Page WE, an add-on for Firefox by DW-dev. The extension provides the capability to "Save a complete web page (as currently displayed) as a single HTML file that can be opened in any browser. Save a single page, multiple selected pages or a list of page URLs. Automate saving from command line." The saved file is not an MHTML file, or one of the other common web archiving file formats, but it is a single HTML file that Firefox and other browsers can read. Save Page WE is implemented using the WebExtensions API and is available for both Firefox and Chrome with identical functions and user interfaces.

[ More Info ]

[/network/web/browser/firefox] permanent link

Sun, Feb 01, 2026 3:27 pm

Viewing Payment Details for a Loan in the Desktop Version of Quicken

If you automatically update a loan's balance by downloading transactions from a bank's website, when you click on "Payment Details" in the Windows Classic Business & Personal desktop version of Quicken, you won't be able to actually view details on payments, such as the amount of principal and interest paid for each transaction. You can change the loan account's settings in Quicken to stop automatically updating the account by right-clicking on the account and then selecting "Edit/Delete account" then clicking on the "Online Services" tab and then clicking on the "Deactivate" button in the online setup portion of the window. When asked "Would you like to deactivate this service?", click on "Yes". You can then close the "Account Details" window. Then, when you choose "Payment Details", you should see the individual transactions for the account and you will be able to modify the opening balance, principal and interest for payments, if needed. If you then want to transfer money from another account, such as a checking account, as a payment on the loan, you may not see the account listed as one of the transfer options in the dropdown list for transfers, but if you type the account name in the Category field exactly as it appears in the account list and then hit the Tab key, the amount you specify will be transferred to the loan account.

[/financial] permanent link

Wed, Jan 28, 2026 2:57 pm

Masquerading a "from" address with sendmail

Many years ago, I distributed email to the mailing list for an organization through my email server. The person who sent out a monthly newsletter to the members of the organization had a Verizon email address and would send the newsletter via my server running Sendmail, which would then send the mail onwards to the organization's members. Since my server wasn't a designated email server for verizon.net addresses, I configured Sendmail to change the "from" domain to my server's domain name, moonpoint.com, so the sending address wouldn't be johnslartibartfast444@verizon.net but would be johnslartibartfast444@moonpoint.com; otherwise many recipients' email servers would reject the email since it didn't come from an email server designated to send email for verizon.net users. I put the following lines in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc (the last two lines are the ones I added to the Masquerade section of the file):
dnl # The following example makes mail from this host and any additional
dnl # specified domains appear to be sent from mydomain.com
dnl #
dnl MASQUERADE_AS(`mydomain.com')dnl
dnl #
dnl # masquerade not just the headers, but the envelope as well
dnl #
dnl FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
dnl #
dnl # masquerade not just @mydomainalias.com, but @*.mydomainalias.com as well
dnl #
dnl FEATURE(masquerade_entire_domain)dnl
dnl #
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost)dnl
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost.localdomain)dnl
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(mydomainalias.com)dnl
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(mydomain.lan)dnl
MAILER(smtp)dnl
MAILER(procmail)dnl
dnl MAILER(cyrusv2)dnl
MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(`verizon.net')dnl
MASQUERADE_AS(`moonpoint.com')dnl

After I edited the sendmail.mc file, I rebuilt the sendmail.cf file by restarting sendmail with the command service sendmail restart , which put the following line in sendmail.cf:

C{M}verizon.net

The person who was sending the newsletter died several years ago and I took over maintaining the membership list for the organization as well as distributing the email version of the newsletters to members. Though the account from which the newsletter is sent is intended to be used only for sending the newsletter and members are advised to send an email related to the organization to the organization's Gmail email addresses, occasionally members will reply directly to the "from" address used for the newsletter. When checking the account for that address, I found that someone with a verizon.net address had sent a reply to the account, but if I replied my reply would go not to his verizon.net address, but to his email name followed by my domain name, which would result in the email bouncing since that address would not be a valid address on my server. I corrected the problem by removing the two MASQUERADE lines in sendmail.mc that resulted in the change to the domain name part of email addresses if any email came from a verizon.net address and then restarted sendmail, which resulted in the C{M}verizon.net line being removed from sendmail.cf.

The sendmail.mc file is a human-readable macro configuration file, while the sendmail.cf file is the more complex configuration file actually used by the Sendmail message transfer agent (MTA). The .mc file serves as the source, which is processed by the m4 macro to generate the final, often uncommented sendmail.cf file used by sendmail. The command m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf can be used to rebuild the .cf configuration file after one makes changes to the sendmail.mc file, but the changes won't take effect until sendmail is restarted. Or, on many newer versions of the Linux operating system, one can simply restart sendmail and a new .cf file will be automatically generated and applied to sendmail, if any changes have been made to the .mc file

References:

  1. 18.4. The sendmail.cf and sendmail.mc Files
    Linux Network Administrators Guide

Related articles:

  1. Modifying the "from" domain of a message with sendmail
    Date: June 1, 2018

[/network/email/sendmail] permanent link

Sun, Jan 18, 2026 4:51 pm

Installing Calibre on Ubuntu Linux

I installed Calibre 8.8.0 on a Ubuntu Linux system through the Ubuntu App Center (I had to filter by Debian packages rather than by Snap packages in the App Center to see Calibre packages as there isn't a Snap package for the software). But when I checked to see if that was the latest version on the Calibre website, I found the latest version is 8.16.2. Also, the Calibre Download for Linux page states "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below." So I uninstalled the version I installed and then reinstalled the software using the command provided on that Calibre webpage, sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin - a command that can be run on any version of Linux.

[ More Info ]

[/ebook/calibre] permanent link

Fri, Dec 12, 2025 7:28 pm

Problem with SQLIte database and table names being the same in Python code

I encountered a problem today when I created a Python program to help me automate the process of entering data into an SQLite database. I've been using DB Browser for SQLite on a laptop running Windows 11 to maintain the database and I installed WinPython 3.12.4.1 today to help me automate some tasks related to SQLite databases I maintain on the laptop. I had the Python program prompt me for data to enter into fields in the database for a new entry in the database. But after I entered data at the prompts, I saw the following error message:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "N:\Sites\AddReference.py", line 65, in <module>
    main()
  File "N:\Sites\AddReference.py", line 58, in main
    prompt_for_entry(cur, conn)
  File "N:\Sites\AddReference.py", line 44, in prompt_for_entry
    insert_entry(cur, conn, ID, Title, Location)
  File "N:\Sites\AddReference.py", line 12, in insert_entry
    cur.execute(
sqlite3.OperationalError: near "References": syntax error

Line 12 in the program was as a cur.execute command in the following function:

def insert_entry(cur, conn, ID, Title, Location):
    # Insert an entry into the database.
    try:
        cur.execute(
            "INSERT INTO References (ID, Title, Location) VALUES (?, ?, ?)",
            (ID, Title, Location)
        )
        conn.commit()
        print("Entry added successfully.\n")
    except sqlite3.IntegrityError as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}\n")

The database was named References and the table into which I was attempting to add entries was also named References. That doesn't pose an SQLite problem — a table within a database can have the same name as the database itself, but that was posing a problem in the Python code that resulted in the error message I received. When I placed single quotes around References in the command, I no longer received the error message and was able to successfully add new entries to the database. I.e., I now have the following Python code, instead.

def insert_entry(cur, conn, ID, Title, Location):
    # Insert an entry into the database.
    try:
        cur.execute(
            "INSERT INTO 'References' (ID, Title, Location) VALUES (?, ?, ?)",
            (ID, Title, Location)
        )
        conn.commit()
        print("Entry added successfully.\n")
    except sqlite3.IntegrityError as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}\n")

[/languages/python] permanent link

Mon, Nov 24, 2025 7:46 pm

Determining the location of a user's "My Documents" folder with PowerShell

I needed to move some files from one Windows 11 system that is no longer being used, as the user is no longer working for the company, to another Windows 11 system where the user of that system, Pam, is now handling a task formerly handled by the prior employee, but while logged onto the account for the user now handling the task on her system, I noticed that her Documents folder was empty. The Windows domain name changed at that business a few years ago, so I thought that perhaps she might be using a Documents directory associated with her account under the prior domain name rather than the new one created for her new domain login. You can determine the location of a user's "My Documents" directory, which can be redirected to another location, including a network share or another drive, by issuing the PowerShell command [Environment]::GetFolderPath("MyDocuments"). E.g.:

Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Try the new cross-platform PowerShell https://aka.ms/pscore6

PS C:\Users\Pam> [Environment]::GetFolderPath("MyDocuments")
C:\Users\Pam\Documents
PS C:\Users\Pam>

The command utilizes the GetFolderPath method from the System.Environment class to retrieve the path of special folders, including "MyDocuments," for the user under whose context the script or command is executed. This method correctly identifies the mapped location even if the Documents folder has been redirected or moved from the default location.

In this case, I found that her "My Documents" directory was pointing to the directory associated with the old domain name. Her "home" folder was also pointing to the home folder that was in use for her account in the old domain. You can type $home in a PowerShell window to see that value. Or you can use $env:USERPROFILE to see the same information.

PS C:\Users\Pam> $Home
C:\Users\Pam
PS C:\Users\Pam >$env:userprofile
C:\Users\Pam
PS C:\Users\Pam>

[/os/windows/PowerShell] permanent link

Sat, Nov 22, 2025 10:12 pm

PowerShell cmdlets to check remote connectivity and firewall rules

When I tried to establish a Secure Shell (SSH) connection to a Windows 11 PC at a remote location today, I was unable to do so. I usually connect to the Windows domain controller at the location and establish the SSH connection to the user's Windows 11 system through it, but that was not working. I thought the problem was likely due to McAfee stopping providing firewall protection for incoming connections to ports on PCs as part of their antivirus software, since the antivirus software on PCs at that location was McAfee Antivirus Plus. When McAfee stopped providing that firewall service as part of McAfee AntiVirus Plus, the software reverted firewall protection for incoming connections to Microsoft's default firewall software, Microsoft Defender Firewall, aka Windows Firewall. When I check firewall protection on a Windows system running McAfee AntiVirus Plus, I now see the following message:

McAfee and Windows Defender are now working side by side

Our Advanced Firewall provides enhanced protection by blocking risky outgoing connections. Windows Defender Firewall provides protection for incoming connections.

Keep both firewalls on for complete protection.

McAfee and Windows Defender

So I thought I likely needed to create similar firewall rules for incoming connections in the Windows Firewall software as had existed previously in the McAfee firewall software.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/PowerShell] permanent link

Fri, Nov 21, 2025 7:55 pm

Changing the "from" address of an email in mutt

To change the "from" address of a message in the Mutt email client while composing a message, you can use Esc-f, i.e., hit the Esc and f keys simultaneously. You will see a "From:" field appear near the bottom of the window with the current "from" address, which you can edit to replace it with whatever you would like. E.g., in the example below, I am changing the "from" address that the recipients of the message will see from jdoe@example.com to newsletter@example.com (the email address is within the angle brackets with a descriptive identifier before it.

y:Send q:Abort t:To c:CC s:Subj a:Attach file d:Descrip ?:Help               
    From: Joe Doe <jdoe@example.com>
      To: "Bruce K." <bkamen2145@gmail.com>
      Cc: albusd@example.com
     Bcc:
 Subject: Re: July 2025 Newsletter
Reply-To:
     Fcc: ~/sent
Security: None


-- Attachments                                                               
- I 1 /var/tmp/mutt-example-508-23668-418711[text/plain, 8bit, utf-8, 1.4K   




-- Mutt: Compose [Approx. msg size: 1.4K Atts: 1]----------------------------
From: Newsletter <newsletter@example.com>

After I've retyped the "from" address to be the one I want to appear, when I hit Enter, I will see the "from" address replaced with the one I want and can then hit y to send the message to recipients.

y:Send q:Abort t:To c:CC s:Subj a:Attach file d:Descrip ?:Help               
    From: Newsletter <newsletter@example.com>
      To: "Bruce K." <bkamen2145@gmail.com>
      Cc: albusd@example.com
     Bcc:
 Subject: Re: July 2025 Newsletter
Reply-To:
     Fcc: ~/sent
Security: None


-- Attachments                                                               
- I 1 /var/tmp/mutt-example-508-23668-418711[text/plain, 8bit, utf-8, 1.4K   




-- Mutt: Compose [Approx. msg size: 1.4K Atts: 1]----------------------------

For a way to change the "from" address from the command line, see Using a command-line interface (CLI) to send email with mutt.

[/network/email/clients/mutt] permanent link

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional

Privacy Policy   Contact

Blosxom logo