Pat Howe's Blog

Hidden advanced options in Microsoft Outlook

Since Microsoft released the 2016 edition of its Outlook product, setting up a new email address has become very easy. Unless of course, you need to access the advanced options for a custom set-up. All is not lost, however, as you can still get to the advanced options just not through Microsoft Outlook. I don’t know who decided to drop it, but I find this sort of feature removal a reason for not upgrading. I suppose, Microsoft Office had become so good by 2003, that they had to start tinkering.

Replacing the hostname on an Ubuntu web server

I have been running a server with a host domain name that had a top level domain of .TV. I didn’t realise but when sending emails from that domain name, even though it was legitimate the word TV is one of those SPAM key words that mail servers look out for. It’s OK if your email content scores lowly on the spammy word count but having one of those bad keywords in the domain name wasn’t helping. So, we dropped the name but I was using it as the host

Using a simple organisational chart in Microsoft Visio

I have been using Visio for many years, going right back to the time before it was part of the Microsoft Office suite. Each year, I upgraded and features have come and gone. Sometimes I can see an improvement but usually I long for the features that have been dropped. My favourite version I think was the one that came with top level of Visual Studio 2003, I think it was called Visio 2003 for enterprise architects. That had a neat database feature where you could generate your database SQL

Setting up and testing free secure certificates

Do you want to apply secure certificates to multiple websites on the same web server? You want them to renew automatically? And want them to be free! Then read on. A few years back, one of my colleagues put me onto this process and I’ve been using it ever since and now I’ve documented it here. I look after a few Linux web servers on AWS and GCP. The administration overhead around purchasing new certificates, setting them up, renewing is time-consuming. It also costs money, although we always went for

Arduino sound sensor noise level detector example

This article follows on from my previous articles about the Arduino microcontroller; Sketch 1: Light Switch and Sketch 2: Light Sensor. In this article I cover an analogue sound sensor with LEDs displaying for the loudness (noise level) of the sound detected. I purchased a multi-pack of sensors a while back and there was a small sound and big sound sensor in that pack. I can’t remember the seller but there are plenty on Amazon and eBay. If you want the one I’m using in this example, you can find it

Installing Jira on Ubuntu Linux with MySQL

This is a walk through of installing Jira 8.1 on on a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS minimised server. The Atlassian website has instructions for installing Jira on Linux or other operating systems but there are so many references to other pages or other sites that I wanted to have everything in one place for one type of set-up. As I have previously set up a Ubuntu server on the Google Cloud Platform that I’m not using, I will use that. So, if you are starting from scratch and want to follow

Get a free Linux server with Google Cloud Platform

After writing about the free (for one year) server available from AWS (see here), I thought I would write about a similar free server from Google Cloud Platform (GCP). There is one main difference between the two; Amazon provide a micro-server for 12 months for free as long as you stay within the allowable package where as Google provide you with a $300 credit that can last up to a maximum of 12 months. Amazon limits the free server instance for your account; 750 hours up-time per month (i.e. one

Upgrade to PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu with GD library fix

I’ve been running a couple of Ubuntu servers on AWS (not the free ones) for years that are still using PHP 5.5. Even though it is out of support I’ve kept with it. They host one of my old applications that I thought may be a problem on PHP 5.6 or later. I have two of these Ubuntu 14.04 LTS servers; one for test and one for production. I had a recent request to host another application that required PHP 5.6 as a minimum. These servers are under utilised so

Get a free Linux server from Amazon Web Services

I always have doubts when I see a claim that something is free but I needed to set up a server for a short period of time and have it publicly available for a few months. It will host three small demo applications and the number of users will be very low and their activity non-intensive. I really didn’t want to purchase anything as it’s for a non-profit or go through the trouble of setting up a more permanent solution as it has no reuse after this exercise. I knew

Arduino light sensor and illumination example

I’ve been meaning to follow up my previous getting started with the Arduino microcontroller article for a while now. Quite a long while as it’s almost three years. The other reason for writing this now is that my first article has been visited quite a lot recently, so I wanted to add to my electronics section. At the end of my last article I asked for suggestions of what to build next but didn’t have any responses. I thought I’d make a variation on my light switch example and have

Cookie notice