Author: admin

Time Etc Virtual Assistants Review – It’s a Scam

My startup tech business has been growing, and I decided it was time to bring in some help to keep up with things like emails, customer service, and so on. I’m not successful enough yet to hire an employee outright, so I started looking into getting a Virtual Assistant.

I read reviews about a company called Time Etc, and decided to give them a try. Now looking back, 3 months later, I wish I hadn’t. I can sum up my experience with Time Etc in one sentence: It’s a Scam. Once they get your money — and you have to pay them up front — they do everything to avoid actually doing the work you’ve paid them for.

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[DEVELOPING] Possible Email DDOS attack exploiting MailPoet (WordPress plugin)

This is a developing issue happening right now, please check back on this page for any updates over the following days.

Last updated 2018-03-29

Starting around March 25, 2018, I started seeing an unusual amount of bounces from my email server. The emails bouncing were the double-opt-in “please confirm your subscription” messages automatically generated by the WordPress plugin MailPoet.  This happens from time to time if, for example, somebody accidentally mis-types their email address. But now, suddenly they were coming in repeatedly for the same handful of addresses, including ones like support@linode.com and abuse@linode.com. So out of curiosity I headed over the Linode Status page, and saw this:

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Fix “Sorry, This File Type Is Not Permitted For Security Reasons” Error in WordPress

So you’re trying to upload an otherwise harmless file into WordPress, and you keep getting a “Sorry, This File Type Is Not Permitted For Security Reasons” error.  Sure you could just upload the file via FTP, but it wouldn’t be attached to anything in the WP database.  Now what do you do?

There are probably many ways to solve this, but here is the approach that worked best for my particular use case.  I’ll share it here in case it helps someone else too.

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Review: Canadian Cloud Hosting (CACloud.com)

Programmer Bear is back online… no thanks to Canadian Cloud Hosting.

Trying new cloud providers has become something of a pastime for me, over the last couple years. In that spirit, last September I moved this very site (programmerbear.com) to a server hosted at Canadian Cloud Hosting (CA Cloud). In the end, I wasn’t very impressed. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to moving this site somewhere else, I feel free to write honestly about my experience at CA Cloud.

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Fuck you Yahoo Mail

I have an email address at Yahoo Mail that I’ve had for at least 10+ years, although nowadays I use it only very occasionally (maybe once every few months) as a “throwaway” address — you know, for those times you have to give out an email address and don’t want to get spammed later.

Well, I should say “had”, because Yahoo just randomly decided to fuck me over today.  Even though I know, without any doubt, my correct username and password, they just won’t let me login.  Isn’t that nice?

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Why I work as hard as I do

I have a bit of a high-maintenance client.  He’s a nice guy and everything, but one of those people who’s a bit too A.D.D. for their own good… you know, always running a mile minute, talks in broken sentences across numerous emails and texts that I later have to piece together, requiring a fair amount of telepathy on my end to figure out what he really wants me to do.

Sometimes he asks me questions by email which cannot be answered in less than two sentences… and I just know that anything I write beyond 2-3 sentences will never be read by this guy.

Well, recently he asked me a question (I think because he’s angling to start some new tech start-up or app or something, and wants to test my interest), and I ended up putting an unexpected amount of time and passion into my reply.  I guess the question hit a chord in me.

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Review: Cloud A – Canadian Cloud Server Hosting

Recently I had to setup a web server for a client using Canadian cloud hosting provider Cloud A.  This was my first time using them, so for anyone else who may be considering Cloud A, I thought I’d share my experience with them so far. (Overall, it’s good…)

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How To Backup Your Entire Server or VPS While It’s Running Using Linux Hot Copy

I run a few cloud servers at Linode and Digital Ocean which host stuff for clients.  Although I have automated backups in place to backup my clients’ data, I always worry about some catastrophic situation where the entire server goes down and, God forbid, needs to be re-built from scratch.

While places like Digital Ocean advertise you can spin up a new Linux server in a matter of seconds — and no doubt you can — what they don’t tell you is how long it takes to configure that server for real-world use. Depending on how many packages, libraries, and other software you need to install, and all the configuration that goes along with it, you could be looking at 2, 3, or even several hours to rebuild a server.  To many of my clients that kind of downtime would be absolutely detrimental (and not too good for my business, either).

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