Category: Science & Geeks

  • More technical news about our web site hack

    More technical news about our web site hack

    After a more thorough analysis, I believe that I have now a clear image of what happened to . It appears that a hacker introduced itself into our web site through an insecure WordPress plugin. The security defect has been corrected relatively quickly, but it left a wide open gap during a few days. The…

  • How to solve an HTTP error 500?

    How to solve an HTTP error 500?

    This appears to be one of the most imprecise errors a web server can through at you. More or less, it means “I tried but I can’t serve and I can’t help with more precise information”. People and forums tend to say that this may be related to database issues or .htaccess issues. But not…

  • Hacked web site

    Hacked web site

    So, it had to happen one day. has been hacked. Nothing very terrible, but a few bad hours for an administrator. The site to be rebuilt in a matter of hours. Passwords to be changed. Several hours lost for nothing. There wasn’t much to steal (the users are not very many). But it is impossible…

  • Archive a Synology NAS on external USB drives

    Archive a Synology NAS on external USB drives

    When you need to store data in a reliable way but you don’t need to read them often, this is named a “cold storage” need. This is typically what I needed for my Synology NAS where I wanted to backup data to an external site (but I don’t intend to actually use the backup since…

  • Ikea-style instructions for computer algorithms

    Ikea-style instructions for computer algorithms

    Designed to help in a computer science and algorithms teaching course, these are great ideas of algorithm descriptions using only simplified drawings and no word (styled like Ikea assembly instructions). I love them. Idea-instructions.

  • GDPR: Some helpful documentation

    GDPR: Some helpful documentation

    It seems that I can help some readers with a library of information about GDPR, the new (in May 2018) European Regulation about Privacy and the handling Personal Data on web sites. It may appear as quite complex. So, I collected a list of those articles I found most interesting for a first reading/introduction (aimed at…

  • How to comply with GDPR in WordPress

    How to comply with GDPR in WordPress

    I have several web sites wirtten with WordPress  and I needed to comply with the new GDPR European regulation (new in May 2018). After a few hours of work to find how to do this right… I decided to share my experience and show the steps I went through; not very difficult, but rather lenghty,…

  • Protection of your privacy and of your data

    Protection of your privacy and of your data

    You may not have noticed it but European Regulations recently required some significant changes on web sites, in order to make sure that they are respectful of their visitors and -even more importantly- of the privacy of their data. Our web site has been adapting since a few weeks with a few nice changes, including:…

  • Easily identify your USB sticks

    Easily identify your USB sticks

    Our computers have more and more USB ports, and we have so many storage drives plugged into them (USB drives, USB thumb drives, memory card readers, etc.) that it is somewhat difficult to recognize them all when they are displayed on the desktop. In the example below, you wonder which one is which among all…