Notes on ZTE ZXHN F601 GPON ONT

Introduction These are my notes while setting up ZTE’s ONT for GPON on a Linux desktop computer. I bought this thing from AliExpress at 20 USD, and got a cartoon box with the ONT itself, a power supply and a LAN cable. This is a follow-up from a previous post of mine. I originally got [...]

http referer info missing in Apache logs for a non-https site

I checked my Apache access logs, and noted that I saw no indications for people clicking links between two of my websites. It was extremely odd, because it was quite clear that at least a few such clicks should happen. In the beginning, I though it was because of the rel=”noopener” part in the link. [...]

PPPoE on fiber with the Linux machine as the router

Introduction Having switched from ADSL to FTTH (fiber to the home), I was delighted to discover that the same script that set up the pppoe connection for ADSL also works with the new fiber connection. And as the title of this post implies, I opted out the external router that the ISP provided, and instead [...]

Internet fiber optics in Israel: The gory technical details

Introduction In July 2023 I finally decided to ditch my ADSL connection and upgrade to fiber optics (FTTH). Living in Israel, the whole thing gets a bit complicated, because there’s a separation between the infrastructure provider and the ISP. In other words, the fiber connections is supplied by company A, which brings the connection to [...]

Google Chrome: Stop that nagging on updates

I have Google Chrome installed on a Linux machine at /opt/google as root, so the browser can’t update itself automatically. Instead, it complains with this pop-up every time the browser is started: What I really like about this pop-up is the “you’re missing out” part. I get the same thing from the silly image gallery [...]

Using git send-email with Gmail + OAUTH2, but without subscribing to cloud services

Introduction There is a widespread belief, that in order to use git send-email with Gmail, there’s a need to subscribe to Google Cloud services and obtain some credentials. Or that a two-factor authentication (2fa) is required. This is not the case, however. If Thunderbird can manage to fetch and send emails through Google’s mail servers [...]

Blocking bots by their IP addresses, the DIY version

Introduction I had some really annoying bots on one of my websites. Of the sort that make a million requests (like really, a million) per month, identifying themselves as a browser. So IP blocking it is. I went for a minimalistic DIY approach. There are plenty of tools out there, but my experience with things [...]

Google Translate, LaTeX and asian languages: Technical notes

Introduction These post contains a few technical notes of using Google Translate for translating LaTeX documents into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The insights on the language-related issues are written down in a separate post. Text vs. HTML Google’s cloud translator can be fed with either plain text or HTML, and it returns the same format. [...]

Translating technical documentation with Google Translate

Introduction This post summarizes my insights as I worked my way through translating some technical documents, written in LaTeX, into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The immediate approach was to feed Google Translate with the pdf documents, but not only are the results ugly, but then there are a lot of technical terms in the documents [...]

Fetchmail and Google’s OAuth 2.0 enforcement

This post is about fetching mail. For sending emails through OAuth2-enabled SMTP servers, see this post. Introduction After a long time that Google’s smtp server occasionally refused to play ball with fetchmail, tons of Critical Alerts on “someone knowing my password” and requests to move away from “Less Secure Apps” (LSA) and other passive-aggressive behaviors, [...]