This is an amusing story about line endings. Originally written as a post for the Voxelmanip Forums, extended and improved as a post on this blog.
Carriage Return, also known as CR, also known as \r, also known as 0x0D, is the bane of every developer working on both Unix-like and Windows systems, as well as the bane of every web developer working with forms.
If you have tried to use any older Android device running Android Oreo 7.1 or below, you might have noticed insecure connection errors when trying to access websites in the browser, or Webview boxes in apps that show a blank page. The problem you are running into is likely that the site uses Let’s Encrypt for their HTTPS certificates, who began dropping support for Android 7.1 and below in February of 2024 as a result of dropping the certificate that provided compatibility for older versions of Android.
While there are alternative browsers such as Firefox that bundle their own CA store and will still work without any further configuration, you can also manually install the missing certificate to make websites function again without security warnings in all apps that rely on the system’s CA store.
Nowadays HTTPS is no longer a luxury only afforded by your bank and other high security websites, but something every website simply should have. Because why shouldn’t you, when there are free certificate authorities that allow you to conveniently secure your site for visitors as well as giving you access to transferring over HTTP/2?
But it has not always been this way. In fact, a decade ago it was quite uncommon to see HTTPS for small, personal or noncommercial websites that simply could not afford to pay the obscene prices that old certificate authorities charged. That is, until Let’s Encrypt was launched.
Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) is a technique used by some ISPs where many customers will share one single public IP address, in order to mitigate IPv4 address exhaustion. However this also has the added downside that you cannot easily host a publicly accessible server from home, even if you have port forwarded.
So if you are planning to set up a publicly accessible from home, whether it be hosting a game server to just making something at home remotely accessible when you’re on the go, it is useful to check if you are behind CGNAT by running a traceroute on your external IP. This post goes over the steps to do so as well as suggestions if you are behind CGNAT.
So I received an email about the picture that I use as a background image on my website. They were asking about the source of it as they couldn’t find it from a reverse image search assuming it was a stock image I had taken from somewhere.
Chromebook is the name of Google’s brand of mostly low-end laptops running Chrome OS, an operating system whose primary functionality is running the Google Chrome browser.
When I finished 9th grade and went onto Gymnasiet, I had the option to keep the Chromebook I was given for the past three years at school. Since I had been keeping good care of it for the past years I was using it, why not? I knew that once it gets unlocked I will have access to the containerised Crostini Linux environment, but I was not aware at the time of the ways one can fully install another operating system on it.