My Monkey Do

A Log of Coding Solutions

Run Long Jobs in Background on Linux

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To run long running jobs on linux and not have to be logged in, do the following:

1. Start a new screen session

screen -L -S longjob

2. Run your long-running command

This will allow you to see the output of the command while it’s also written to a log file

your-command --with --args |& tee -a ~/longjob.log

3. Detach and leave it running

Ctrl + A then D

4. Log out safely

exit

5. Reattach later

screen -r longjob

6. When you’re done

Ctrl + D

Spam Filters for Smarter Spam Tactics

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Problem

Backscatter “bounce” emails are landing in the inbox—legitimate Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs) from Google’s Mailer-Daemon with “Address not found.” The attached/original shows spam that spoofed your address and tried sending to a non-existent recipient (e.g., [email protected]). Because the spammer forged your envelope sender, the receiving server rejected the message and sent the failure notice back to you.

Solution

These DSNs are real system reports, not the spam itself—and the likely cause is not that your email is compromised, but that someone spoofed your address.

Don’t mark these DSNs as spam; doing so can pollute spam training and may hide bounce reports you actually need. Instead, auto-handle only the unwanted DSNs tied to that bogus recipient with a precise Gmail filter:

from:[email protected] ("X-Failed-Recipients: <BOGUS-ADDRESS>" OR "Your message wasn't delivered to <BOGUS-ADDRESS>")

Replace <BOGUS-ADDRESS> with the invalid recipient you’re seeing, then create the filter and choose Skip the Inbox (Archive) or Delete. This keeps your inbox clean, preserves accurate spam training, and ensures legitimate bounce messages still surface—while recognizing that spoofing (not account compromise) is the root cause.

Class “Some/Namespace/App.php” not found (only on server)

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The Problem

Everything works fine on your Mac OS setup, but for some reason, on your Linux server you get the error below. All file names look correct, case sensitive and all.

Class "Some/Namespace/App.php" not found.

The Solution

When you rename a file on Mac and it’s just changing the case, git won’t pick it up. So while you think it’s renamed on the server, it may not be! When renaming a file and it’s just changing the case, use:

git mv app.php App.php

Thisisunsafe

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Problem

Sometimes you need to run https sites locally and you can’t get by Chrome’s warning of NET::ERR_CERT_INVALID. Google has removed the link to just bypass this warning recently.

Solution

While this is more of a workaround than a solution (you should resolve the invalid cert), you can get by Chrome’s security warning by typing “thisisunsafe”. Don’t type it in the address bar, just have the window in focus. You won’t see what you’re typing, but when you finish typing the browser window will reload and display the site.

Workaround to WordPress Custom HTML block error

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Problem

Sometimes you just want to write part of an HTML code block to maybe wrap the next block in. Or some small part of HTML that may not make sense to the editor. It doesn’t matter though. The block editor will throw an error like “This block contains unexpected or invalid content”. Irritating.

Solution

One solution is to create a simple shortcode and return the html you want to write out. Shortcodes let you return whatever HTML you want and the block editor won’t know about it.

Free up Email Storage

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Now that Google Photos is no longer free, Google storage will be eaten up pretty quickly if you’re still using them. One area you can free up some space is your email in gmail.

Search, Select All, Delete

To reduce space, first you would need to find the emails you want to remove. Searching is Google’s specialty so this is no problem. Google lists the search operators you can use on this page. But you can also use some of my hand dandy searches below.

Once you find the emails to delete, you can select all by checking the select all checkbox in the upper left corner, then you can click on “Select all conversations that match this search”.

Now that you have all the email you want to delete selected, click on the Trash icon to delete. You’ll have 30 days to change your mind. After that it will be deleted forever. Of course you can also go into your trash and Delete Forever right now.

Now onto some helpful handy dandy search queries:

Search for the big stuff.

Find all emails with attachments larger than 5mb, 10mb, or larger and older than so many years. A pretty conservative search would be to find attachments 15mb or larger older than 4 years old. To find more mail, reduce the size or the years.

size:15mb has:attachment older_than:4y


Search for the un important stuff

No one reads all the promotions that reach your mailbox, so why keep them? If your gmail is automatically categorizing emails, you can find all your promotional emails older than so many years and remove them.

category:promotions older_than:2y


Search for that specific one

Sometimes deleting a category may be too much. You can also target emails from specific senders or unread emails.

from:([email protected]) older_than:2y is:unread