I’ve held off on this, thinking maybe they would fix the issues. However, the app has gone to shit. It’s SOOOOO fucking slow to lookup, checkin, comment, etc it’s insane. I was trying to checkin beers tonight and finally gave up. Waiting MINUTES yielded nothing. The app took 60 seconds plus to load. This has gotten insane. It’s down all the time, hardly works when it’s up, and is SOOO fucking laggy it’s hard to use even when it does work. This needs fixed guys, like now. I know you want to add sponsors and get money, I get that, but when the app doesn’t work for shit I can’t even use it! So, fuck this app, and fuck you all. Fix this shit!!!!
Internet Home of Dan Bunyard
Author: Dan Bunyard
Fuck you Groupon
So, in case you didn’t know this, Groupon CANNOT replace a product even if it was the wrong one shipped to you. Sound insane? You aren’t alone. Should you be shipped, say, a refurbished product rather than a new one you have exactly 2 choices:
- Get a refund and re-purchase likely at a higher price and HOPE you get what you were supposed to.
- Deal with it.
Seem shitty? Yeah me too. Let me lay the groundwork here:
On November 28th 2016 I purchased an (advertised as new) Philips Hue starter kit. The package shipped the next day and arrived on December 3rd 2016. Opening the package it was immediately clear it was a refurbished set:
Alright, I’m sure customer support can help. I emailed asking for either a replacement with a new product, or a partial refund. Instead I’m offered a refund to “purchase a new one” at a most likely higher price:
I was, probably more than I should have been, rather grumpy and responded with this:
So I get this encouraging reply, maybe I’m finally getting somewhere!
Great, so I was very let down and still don’t have a satisfactory resolution to this issue. So I replied with a rather succinct resolution request (again probably a little grumpy):
To which we come back to square one:
As posted above this has nothing to do which what I believe. The boxes are CLEARLY labeled a refurbished and the hub came in a generic ziploc bag. So here we are. Nearly 2 weeks later and I still have no resolution other than refund and buy again, at a higher price and with the hope that I am shipped a new set this time. How crappy of a resolution is that? And should it really take 2 weeks? If Groupon wants to actually wanted to keep customers this is not the way to do it. I understand they operate on a tight margin but this is NOT the way to handle a problem that THEY CAUSED.
So, if some Groupon person actually reads this, I would really like a satisfactory resolution to this problem.
EDIT 20161215: Initiated a chargeback last night with CapitalOne. They were super easy to work with and had the dispute filed within a few minutes. All I want is the damn thing replaced with a new product. Groupon has left me no other choice, so I’ll let them sort it out with the credit card company. Enjoy assholes.
Open letter to Comcast and the FCC
Hello,
With the recent Comcast rollout of nationwide 1TB data caps I feel it is crucial that I submit my complaint. Data caps are a problem and without swift action will be a much larger issue in the near future limiting not only innovative uses of the Internet but the entire global flow of information.
Data caps are not only an inconvenience to those customers but are simply against net-neutrality at its core. This is nothing more than a money grab and attempt to get people to stick with the dying cable TV model. It even excludes Comcast related data from that cap!!
It unnecessarily impedes emerging video technologies such as 4k streaming while simultaneously punishing those that dare to download large games or files. It’s not even rooted in network congestion: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml
For example: streaming 4k content according to Netflix uses roughly 4.7GB per hour. Doing that math that’s ~7 hours PER DAY before hitting said 1TB cap. Multiply that by 2 or 3 other members of a household and you can watch at most a few hours per day. This is assuming you do absolutely NOTHING else with that Internet connection.
The further encroachment of data caps sets a dangerous precedent that unchecked will stifle innovation and let ISPs control the flow of information into households. This is something that needs to be curbed quickly to prevent ISPs restricting the flow of information simply to benefit themselves.
I urge you to please consider restrictions or outright banning of data caps on hardline Internet connections such as cable and DSL. I further ask that you investigate data caps on cell data to determine if there is actually any legit reason they exist. T-Mobile is a great example. They allow very specific traffic to NOT count towards a data cap. This is also against net-neutrality.
Full disclosure: I’m not a Comcast customer, I am with Time Warner (now Spectrum). I do not have a data cap but average right around 2TB per month with what I consider normal usage, at least for the next generation. Data usage is only going to increase and at a rapid pace as new technologies emerge.
I’ll say it a second time, please consider a ban on data caps. This is nothing but the stifling of innovation, holding onto an archaic business model, and lining of pockets of ISP executives. What we ACTUALLY need is more innovation, more competition, and a stronger Internet presence as a country.
Signed,
Dan Bunyard
Mozilla Firefox Performance in 2016
I’ll keep this one short. WTF is Mozilla doing with Firefox? How can the performance POSSIBLY be so crappy on a machine with 16GB of RAM, an SSD, and a discrete video card? 20 second lag between switching tabs, 20 second lag even to minimize. Startup with ~8 tabs takes MINUTES at best. I want to like Firefox, I really do, but every other browser just destroys it in performance and hell, is ACTUALLY USABLE, that I just cannot default to Firefox. I’d love to know what the devs are thinking…..
Nationwide Property and Appraisal – Customer Oriented?
To avoid any slander accusations I’m going to keep this strictly factual and hopefully steer customers away from this organization. I’m simply here to outline the facts and show that in fact no, this company doesn’t care in the slightest about the customer. I would also like to note that they had no concern over the timely delivery of my appraisal until I contacted them some 3 weeks after it was submitted.
This started on 11/12/2015 when my loan broker submitted for an appraisal. The loan was an FHA and had to have a third-party appraisal to complete the process. I was told this normally takes 7-10 days, 2 weeks at most. This appraisal was sent to Nationwide for completion. However they failed to give a timely appraisal and even admitted that the time-frame was unacceptable.
So after submission on 11/12 I was in contact with my lender for updates. He had little to go on and simply told me that they were still waiting. On 12/1/2015 I took matters into my own hands and contacted the company directly. Initial responses were positive, and it was admitted that the timeframe given by the appraiser was unacceptable:
Things appeared to be progressing, and the did managed to refund ~half of my money. I was content and expected that the issue was addressed and would actually get my appraisal in the next few days. And I did…sort of….
I got my initial appraisal on 12/3/2015 however there were two issues found. A missing handrail on the basement stairs and a leaky kitchen faucet. Both were promptly resolved and re-inspected within days however it took an ENTIRE WEEK to get an updated report. I did not receive my final appraisal until 12/10/2015. On 12/9/2015 I emailed requesting a full refund and for the final report the next day (which they did deliver). This email went unanswered:
I was met with radio silence, not a peep. As mentioned above I did get the final report the next day however I never heard from Nationwide at all. Over the past weeks/months I have attempted to reach them via email and phone demanding a full refund. In every single instance I was ignored. Not even a response saying no. So here we are….still no resolution. It was even claimed that somehow they applied the golden rule:
They have straight out ignored that statement.
So I leave it to you, the reader, to assess this post and come to your own conclusions.
CloudFlare Bulk IP Update Utility
A huge need that I’ve had in the past is a bulk update utility for my CloudFlare DNS records. Well I finally finished up the script to do just that! It’s similar to the freedns.afraid.org utility to do a global find/replace of an IP address. You can find the code here: https://github.com/danodemano/cloudflare-bulk-ip-update Enjoy!!
MOAP Link
This post exists solely to be a search landing page for those looking for MOAP or the Mother Of All Puzzles. The link to MOAP is here: http://moap.danodemano.com.
Tron Download Link
Since I seem to be getting a number of searches for Tron here is the link to access the download area: https://www.danodemano.com/Tron
SmugMug Uploads through Astaro/Sophos UTM Hanging
Since I found exactly zero information on the topic I thought I would throw together a quick blog post in the event other’s run into trouble with this. It’s been a few weeks since I last uploaded pictures so I’m not sure what changed, might be the new “beta” firmware I’m running but I’m not convinced of that.
Anyway the problem is when you attempt to upload files to a SmugMug gallery it will “hang” with the bars all the way filled. They will also fill very quickly (much faster than your upload speed) since the Sophos box is intercepting them. If you start digging into the logs on the Sophos box you will see something like the following:
2014:11:30-19:00:31 gateway httpproxy[5489]: id=”0002″ severity=”info” sys=”SecureWeb” sub=”http” name=”web request blocked” action=”block” method=”PUT” srcip=”192.168.9.9″ dstip=”54.85.78.68″ user=”” ad_domain=”” statuscode=”504″ cached=”0″ profile=”REF_HttProContaInterNetwo2 (Everything Else)” filteraction=”REF_DefaultHTTPCFFAction (Default content filter action)” size=”2647″ request=”0xad9b1000″ url=”http://upload.smugmug.com/photos/xmlrawadd.mg” referer=”http://www.bunyardpics.com/Family/Bunyard-Thanksgiving-20141129/” error=”Connection to server timed out” authtime=”0″ dnstime=”513″ cattime=”53″ avscantime=”5640″ fullreqtime=”61679447″ device=”0″ auth=”0″ ua=”Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.122 Safari/537.36″ exceptions=”” reputation=”neutral” category=”179″ reputation=”neutral” categoryname=”Media Sharing”
or
2014:11:30-19:03:49 gateway httpproxy[5489]: id=”0002″ severity=”info” sys=”SecureWeb” sub=”http” name=”web request blocked” action=”block” method=”PUT” srcip=”192.168.9.9″ dstip=”54.85.152.234″ user=”” ad_domain=”” statuscode=”504″ cached=”0″ profile=”REF_HttProContaInterNetwo2 (Everything Else)” filteraction=”REF_DefaultHTTPCFFAction (Default content filter action)” size=”0″ request=”0xc8654000″ url=”http://upload.smugmug.com/photos/xmlrawadd.mg” referer=”http://www.bunyardpics.com/Family/Bunyard-Thanksgiving-20141129/” error=”Connection to server timed out” authtime=”0″ dnstime=”36673″ cattime=”120″ avscantime=”5954″ fullreqtime=”62055195″ device=”0″ auth=”0″ ua=”Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.122 Safari/537.36″ exceptions=””
or
2014:11:30-19:14:37 gateway httpproxy[5489]: id=”0002″ severity=”info” sys=”SecureWeb” sub=”http” name=”web request blocked” action=”block” method=”PUT” srcip=”192.168.9.9″ dstip=”54.85.78.68″ user=”” ad_domain=”” statuscode=”504″ cached=”0″ profile=”REF_HttProContaInterNetwo2 (Everything Else)” filteraction=”REF_DefaultHTTPCFFAction (Default content filter action)” size=”2647″ request=”0xa978800″ url=”http://upload.smugmug.com/photos/xmlrawadd.mg” referer=”http://www.bunyardpics.https://www.danodemano.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=491&action=edit&message=10com/Family/Bunyard-Thanksgiving-20141129/” error=”Connection to server timed out” authtime=”0″ dnstime=”114″ cattime=”0″ avscantime=”0″ fullreqtime=”62108802″ device=”0″ auth=”0″ ua=”Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.122 Safari/537.36″ exceptions=”av,auth,content,url,ssl,certcheck,certdate,mim
depending on if you have tried to create bypass rules to solve this issue. If you follow the progressing this first is prior to any rules, the next is with a bypass domain in the web filter profile, and the third is with a bypass in the core exceptions list. In all three cases you will notice the 504 connection timed out errors. This is, I think though can’t prove, related to the Sophos box trying to scan the picture upload.
So enough of the preamble, how does one fix this? It’s actually pretty simple, you need to entirely bypass the upload.smugmug.com domain group. You can do so with the following steps:
- Log into your Sophos UTM web UI
- Navigate to Web Protection -> Filtering Options -> Misc
- Under “Transparent mode skiplist” area click the plus (+) next to “Skip transparent mode source hosts/nets”
- In the “Add network definition” box create a definition with the following:
- Name: Smugmug Uploads (Or whatever name you want to identify this definition)
- Type: DNS group
- Hostname: upload.smugmug.com
- Comment: [blank] (unless you want to make a more detailed note about this definition)
- Click save then click the folder icon next to “Skip transparent mode destination hosts/nets”
- In the list that populates on the left choose your “Smugmug Uploads” and drag it into the box under “Skip transparent mode destination hosts/nets”
- Click “Apply” at the bottom of the “Transparent mode skiplist” area
You should now be able to upload pictures without issue! Please leave a comment if you have questions/problems.
SSH Tunneling and Proxy Configuration on Linux
So I’ve spent quite a while trying to make this work and wanted to document it for others to use. What this is going to do is allow you to proxy you web traffic through a server using SSH. In the case of my setup it will be Linux on both ends (server running CentOS and PC running Mint). Alright so let’s get started.
You will really only need two parts for this, a server (or VPS) running Linux with SSH enabled and a Linux computer.
First you need to establish the SSH tunnel to the server using the D flag to bind to an address. We will also be enabling compression which is the C flag:
ssh -D 8080 -C user@server.example.com
Obviously you will need to replace “user” with your username and “server.example.com” with your servers address. It will prompt you for the password after you hit enter.
You now have the needed tunnel established to the server. You have two options at this point, either configure Firefox alone to use the proxy or setup the system for the proxy. If you are wanting only to proxy Firefox take a look here. You will want to only fill in the SOCKS proxy with 127.0.0.1 and a port of 8080.
If you want to setup the proxy for the entire system you need to go to menu->preferences->network. Scroll to the bottom and choose network proxy. Fill in the SOCKS host with 127.0.0.1 and port with 8080 and turn it on.
You are set to go! You will now have your traffic tunneled through the server. Enjoy!