A Nerdy Quest, Puzzle Wednesday!

When I was a traveling consultant, one of my favorite little games was grabbing the USA Today puzzle section from the Admirals Club and trying to finish the Sudoku before the wheels of the jet left the ground. I got better over time, though I still didn’t finish it before every takeoff. Eventually, I added crossword puzzles to the mix, largely due to the influence of my friend James.

https://www.brandenwilliams.com/blog/2026/01/28/a-nerdy-quest-puzzle-wednesday/

SSH Proxy, Using a Jumphost

Those who know me know about my love of the Raspberry Pi. I've got tons of them stashed around various places to provide a variety of services. One thing I use them for is to allow me access into remote networks via Twingate for troubleshooting or maintenance purposes. Usually these networks are less sophisticated with consumer-grade tech enabling them, and Twingate provides a nice way to be able to access specific hosts easily over their technology.

https://www.brandenwilliams.com/blog/2025/10/14/ssh-proxy-using-a-jumphost/

I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING this Kasm journey I am on. I just got a weird email that set off all the alarm bells. Looks legit, asking me to take action, not sure what it is though because I don't have recollection of what I submitted to generate this.

Fired up a Firefox browser on my Kasm box, plunked the link in, and interacted with the site. As it turns out, it was legit, but the sheer contribution to my peace of mind cannot be overstated.

Level Up Cybersecurity with Kasm Workspaces

Ever look at plethora of browser tabs staring back at you with "I'll check this out later" vibes and feel the urge to mercy-close the ones that just wont get done anytime soon? Browser tabs are now another subtle, nagging to-do list that gets neglected or ignored. I'm specifically referring to the tabs in the middle of your window that you pinky-promised you would revisit.

https://www.brandenwilliams.com/blog/2025/01/23/level-up-cybersecurity-with-kasm-workspaces/

Zelle finally getting the light shone on it by the CFPB. The amount of extra anti-fraud tech that we had to put around it at MUB was insane. Somehow Zelle and the operators have escaped Reg E responsibilities as well with banks kinda shrugging if you are a victim of fraud.

https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2024/12/21/cfpb-sues-big-banks-over-zelle-fraud

pgMail 1.5 Released!

Well, it's pretty rare that I get anyone talking about my old PostgreSQL email stored procedure, but here we are. I wrote this thing almost 25 years ago to essentially replicate the functionality of xp_sendmail into PostgreSQL. I released it to the world, because I knew other people would have this issue. And as it turned out, they absolutely do.

https://www.brandenwilliams.com/blog/2024/12/10/pgmail-1-5-released/

Let’s Encrypt for non-webservers

Let's say you want to use Let's Encrypt for something that isn't a website. So you download certbot, you get things going with your manual cert, and you realize that when it goes to rotate you will need to restart some services. When you go look through the docs, it's not very clear on how to do this exactly. So here's my post to remind myself what I did (and if it helps you as well, then hooray!).

https://www.brandenwilliams.com/blog/2024/11/27/lets-encrypt-for-non-webservers/