Grinding Gears

Back in 2015 we joined in with an internet custom by posting pictures of our desks in all their glorious variety. Now that it's 2018, National Work from Home Day and a few years since that post, a followup is in order. Some folks have moved, others have joined and we don't often get to look at one another's desks—usually we get to see what's behind them on video calls!… Continue reading

OpenVPN is a wonderfully flexible piece of software in anyone's toolkit, but recently we found a sharp edge that wasn't the most obvious thing to work around. After spinning up a new VPN server we wanted to add username/password authentication against an external source. Looking at the OpenVPN documentation, the --auth-user-pass-verify <script> flag provides this functionality. Writing the script for this was easy enough — read the credentials from a… Continue reading

When can a single array instance in Ruby both be empty and contain items simultaneously? Read on, and find out! Continue reading

Given a requirement of generating a temporary passphrase that can be communicated over the phone to another person, I thought of XKCD #936 which suggests using four random words together as a passphrase. Then there's just the question of how to generate that easily. On each system there's a file containing a list of words somewhere, on OS X it's located at /usr/share/dict/words. This contains a good ~236,000 words on… Continue reading

It's become somewhat of a custom around the internet to post pictures of your desks, especially when you're not all sat in the same office. I know I certainly enjoy looking at other people's desks & environments, so without further ado, here's our desks & views from around FreeAgent. Caius (Shropshire, UK) Cédric (Lyon, France) Harry (Toronto, Canada) Nathan (Sheffield, UK) Olly (Edinburgh, UK - in our head office) Philip… Continue reading