Blogs

Copy and paste operations are most often associated with text, but you can also copy and paste images and other formats. This example demonstrates how to pull an image off of the system clipboard using the Pillow package in Python. It has a convenient method for pulling images from the clipboard. There are a few ways you might get an image in your clipboard. For example, if you used your Grab or Snipping Tool to capture a section of your screen, but you haven't actually saved it yet, you can CTRL-C to copy the image to your clipboard. Or, if you right click an image in a web browser and choose "Copy Image".

This tutorials demonstrates how to use Python for text-to-speech using a cross-platform library, pyttsx3. This lets you synthesize text in to audio you can hear. This package works in Windows, Mac, and Linux. It uses native speech drivers when available and works completely offline. We will walk through how to install, convert text-to-speech, and switch between voices and languages.

ASCII art has a long history in the hacker culture. If you check out any Phrack article and there is almost guaranteed to be some form of ASCII art in there. In this example we are specifically talking about ASCII art fonts that can be used to make banner text for command-line applications, network services, documentation, web pages, etc.

Learn the basics of TomCat web server and Java servlet container. We'll cover how to install it, serve static and JSP content, and basic management tools. Perfect for someone looking to get a quick start with TomCat.

Nginx, pronounced "engine X", is a fast and lightweight web server, that can be used to serve static files, but is often used as a reverse proxy. It has some very nice features like load balancing and rate limiting. We'll cover some common use cases like serving files, creating a directory listing, reverse proxying to pass incoming traffic to a local web server, adding SSL encryption, and how to require https and www on your site. This guide is for someone who needs a quick reference to setting up a simple nginx server. For the latest documentation always check out the official website https://www.nginx.com/ and the source mirror at https://github.com/nginx/nginx.

If you need a quick-and-dirty HTTP server that doesn't need fancy configuration, try some of these one-line HTTP servers in languages like Python, Ruby, and PHP. Some examples include a small script that allows you to embed the server in to your program and add more customization. These are not intended for production use.

Let's Encrypt is "a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority." They provide free signed certificates as a trusted certificate authority. This tutorial walks through the process of installing certbot and requesting new certificates and renewing existing ones wit Let's Encrypt. If you are just looking to generate your own quick self-signed certificates, check out my tutorial on creating self-signed SSL certificates with OpenSSL.

This tutorial will walk through the process of creating your own self-signed certificate. You can use this to secure network communication using the SSL/TLS protocol. For example, to run an HTTPS server. If you don't need self-signed certificates and want trusted signed certificates, check out my LetsEncrypt SSL Tutorial for a walkthrough of how to get free signed certificates.