Today’s hack is about turning Friday Hacks’ boring static Github Pages website into a more dynamic blogging platform powered by Jekyll. In order to do that, I set to find a sample template that would fit the style and content of this site. The HPSTR theme by mmistakes was the perfect fit

Before

FridayHacks website, using static Github Pages

After

FridayHacks website, using HPSTR Jekyll theme

First, I had to fork the HPSTR repository, cloned it on my sandbox, and installed dependencies with

 bundle install

Then, I modified certain files such as _config.yml and navigation.yml, and I also did a bit of clean up (removed sample blog posts and unused pictures).

Now, every time I want to add a new post, I add it to the _posts folder with a .md extension. Then, need to test it in localhost by changing url parameter in the _config.yml file to serve in localhost instead of the fridayhacks.com url:

 url: #http://fridayhacks.com

Then, I need to run the following commands:

 bundle exec jekyll build
 bundle exec jekyll serve

If all goes well, I uncomment the url in the _config.yml file and push it directly to Github.

In today’s hack, we worked on giving the OpenNEAR project some color and personality. We started by creating a simple logo with the awesome website LogoMakr

The basic logo now looks like this

It is simple and elegant. Then, we built a simple website using Bootstrap and Github pages. Nothing too complicated. It is very simple static website:

Now the have some small branding going on, it is time to get to work and get things done.

Credits: Check out the new logo that I created on LogoMakr.com https://logomakr.com/4s50NM

Today’s hack is Mac specific. We look into solving a big data problem: email search. More specifically, we will use Mac’s Mailsteward application to download and archive emails from different accounts.

Archiving emails is a good strategy, you never know when you would need an specific email. Mailsteward allows to archive emails into a MySQL database, so you can perform complex queries from multiple accounts at the same time.

To get started, you need to make sure to have MySQL server installed in your Mac. Then, go to Mailsteward and download a trial version (upgrade when you need to) to test it out. In our case, we went with a trial version of Mailsteward Pro. The way it works is that Mailsteward will work with Apple Mail and archive your emails into a database independently of Apple Mail, without removing them from Apple Mail. The database will be hosted locally, but you can set a remote database server if you wish so.

After installing Mailsteward, you can take a look at the MySQL tables

Next, we will connect Mailsteward with Apple Mail, so Mailsteward will be pulling emails from Apple Mail connected accounts

Start archiving process:

Once we are done, it will tell you how many emails got archived from all your accounts. You can allow for duplicate emails or disable duplicates.

Now you have an email database, everything indexed and organized:

You can then perform complex search queries in your entire email database:

Finally, you can schedule automatic email archiving as follows:

And voila! Your own email database ready for big data queries.

In today’s Friday Hack, we take a look at passwords. Where are you currently storing your passwords? In a Google Drive File? In a Word Document? In a piece of paper? Well, it turns out that the best way to secure your password is to implement a Password Manager.

Why use a Password Manager? In theory, you should have different passwords for different services. This means that your Facebook password should be different from your gmail password. Your twitter password should be different from your Instagram password. Additionally, it is highly recommended that you use a combination of lower case letter + upper case letters + number + a special character. And, that you do not use common words, but rather a hash-like password such as 2986b7f0cd0ba9827ace0810c8818825. The longer and more complicated your password is, the more secure and harder to crack it becomes.

So, here is where Password Managers come in handy. They allow you to create your own database of passwords. Note that there are cloud-based services that can manage your passwords online, but if such company ever gets hacked, so get your passwords.

In this session, we will look at implementing a DB of passwords, where you manually organize your passwords, and that is completely disconnected from everything. There exists a common file format for the DB, and it is supported by many different Password Managers, the “.kdb” extension.

We started using KeePassX for Linux. Here is a how it works after downloading the application:

Create a master password:

Create or Select a Database. In this case, we have a dummy Database named “passdb1”

Manually Create a tree-structure to organize your passwords. You can add, edit, or remove a key.

Add your username and password, and other relevant information

Save it. And that’s it! Now, every time you look for a password, open the KeePassX application, supply the master password, then look for the password you need.

In the future, we will look into backing up this database of passwords.

Today’s Friday Hack is about Security. Yes. With the increasing amount of concern over privacy and security over the internet, more and more people are starting to use a Virtual Private Network or VPN. VPNs offer a lot of interesting features such as privacy, encrypting your information, changing your IP, among other things.

The following video explains the advantages and disadvantages of the top 3 paid VPN services: Private Internet Access vs NordVPN vs ExpressVPN

Given that today is “Black Friday”, some of these companies have very interesting promo codes, so we decided to give NordVPN a try since it is offering a very good deal. The service is not free, but your security and your privacy comes at a cost these days. If you do not want to pay for a VPN, and you are ok with letting your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Google know everything about you, then it is up to you.

We should start moving towards being more concerned about our privacy and security. So, we configured NordVPN for both Ubuntu and Android. If you are interested, the Ubuntu installation tutorial is found here, and the Android installation tutorial is here