At work, I often need to share secrets and other important information with my colleagues. We use Slack to communicate with each other, and that’s good enough for the most part. Now and then, we share secret stuff. Like, top secret. There are many paste bins on the internet that we could use, but I don’t really trust them for these things. So I created my own: npaste.

npaste is a very simple paste bin that supports both images and text. It uses GPG to encrypt pastes before they are uploaded to the server. The encryption key is appended to the URL after a hashbang on the client uploading the paste, so the server never knows about the key. In the browser, the paste is decrypted using OpenGPG.

The npaste cli client supports downloading pastes, both encrypted and non-encrypted. I haven’t spent much time perfecting the project, so contributions to it are very welcome. Let’s have a look at how it works!

Let’s say you have some super secret text that you’d like to share with your colleague. You store it in a file named super-secret.txt and then run the following command:

npaste --encrypt --no-archive=1 -age=1h super-secret.txt

The npaste client will do all the dirty work and return a URL (it’s also copied to the clipboard automatically):

https://paste.yourdomain.com/68678632939f75e9bbd0a4f8#e61ac5c997098e59337b653a27fcff27

By specifying the --no-archive=1 flag, you tell the server to physically delete this paste after it expires, as opposed to just archiving it. The --age=1h flag tells the server to set the expiration of the paste to one hour in the future.

There’s really nothing else you’d have to do if you wanted to upload an image instead. The CLI script will take care of all the dirty work, so the command is exactly the same:

npaste --encrypt --no-archive=1 -age=1h super-secret.jpg

Behind the scenes, the image will be Base64 encoded before being encrypted, and in the browser it will be decoded after being decrypted.

If someone sends you an npaste link and you’d like to download it to your computer, it’s as simple as this:

npaste --get https://paste.yourdomain.com/68678632939f75e9bbd0a4f8#e61ac5c997098e59337b653a27fcff27

The CLI script will figure out that this paste needs to be decrypted and it will store it in a file with the same name as the paste ID. You can then open it in your editor of choice to edit it.

If you’re interested in contributing to the project, feel free to do so. It lives over on my private Gitea server:

npaste – a simple paste bin

This is something I don’t do that often, and I always forget the correct syntax. Thus this post.

Let’s say you have a table images and a table users. Now you want to delete all rows in table images that are associated with rows in the table users that are marked as deleted.

First, I usually do a visual inspection of the rows that will be deleted:

SELECT i.* FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

The rows returned by this query are the rows that will be deleted when you run the following query:

DELETE i FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

They key part here is to specify which table you want to delete from. In this case it’s the table i, which is the images table.

Deleting rows with a LEFT JOIN in MySQL

Disabling the password needed for sudo for a specific user is very easy in Ubuntu. This method applies to Ubuntu 16.04, but probably also other versions of Ubuntu and maybe even other distros.

Note: If this is the first time you’re running this command, you’ll most likely be presented with a list of editors to choose from. Choose the one you’re most comfortable with.

Then enter the following line at the end of the file:

Make sure to replace user with the username of the user you want to allow using sudo without entering a password.

Disabling password for sudo in Ubuntu

The Royal Norwegian Air Force practices formation flying every year in December. This year, they were schedule to fly over Bodø at 11:22 on December 8th. I managed to capture them with my zoom lens just a couple minutes after their scheduled arrival.

It wasn't the greatest light for photographing moving aircrafts, but I managed to get a couple of photos that turned out somewhat okay.

RNoAF Christmas Star 2022

I relatively recently posted about moving my website to WordPress. This actually still holds true, but I’ve given the website a new look and made some changes to the deployment routines.

Now I have a solid development focused foundation based on Trellis.

My website is my playground. This is where I can freely play with any new technologies that I come across and just have some fun. It’s important to me that some of the things I do on the computer is just for fun, and not only work related – there’s quite a lot of that.

My previous WordPress setup was just a Digital Ocean droplet created using their One-Click WordPress installation. This works fine if you just want a website up and running where you can add a theme and your favorite plugins and start typing. But it gets a bit trickier when you want to have a local development version of the site on your computer and a production version, and even maybe a staging version, running live on the internet.

This is where Trellis comes into play. It’s a ready-to-use setup based on Bedrock and Ansible and lots of other good stuff that makes it really simple to get up and running with three different environments:

The workflow for setting up a new site once you have Trellis installed is something along the lines of:

Do some small adjustments to a couple of configuration files for the hosts (servers) and the various environments

Create a git repository of your project and push it to ie. Github

And voilà! Your site is now deployed to the staging server. Of course, you must have set up a server somewhere to use as a staging server. The same goes for the production environment.

In addition to this, I use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin(s) so that I can easily migrate my database and media files from one environment to another.

Website changes – again

I'm Kim, a full-stack web developer and entrepreneur based in Bodø, Norway. Currently occupied with running my own company, being a father and raising a little standard poodle.

Full-stack web developer, business owner and tech geek.

npaste – a simple paste bin

Uploading text

Uploading images

Downloading a paste

Contributions are welcome