WIJFR: Siege Perilous

Ocyrhoe, a young, cunning fugitive from Rome, safeguards a chalice of subtle but great power. Finding herself in France, she allies with the persecuted, pacifist Cathar sect in their legendary mountaintop stronghold, Montségur. There she resists agents of the Roman Church and its Inquisition, fights off escalating, bloody besiegement by troops of the King of …

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Synology DiskStation DS214

Let’s try this again … I was having way too many problems with my new Buffalo Linkstation LS420 so I sent it back and decided to give a different brand a try. It was slightly more expensive, but I selected the Synology DiskStation DS214 2-bay NAS, populated with two 3TB Western Digital Red NAS hard drives …

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WIJFR: Katabasis

The death of the fearsome Ögedei Khan has brought the Mongol invasion of the West to an abrupt halt. Exhausted, plagued by uncertainty and self-doubt, and reeling from betrayal by one of their own, the surviving Shield-Brethren struggle across a frozen, shattered wasteland to return home after their desperate battle in Mongolia. Their mission is …

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Buffalo LinkStation LS420

Back in 2006 I purchased my first NAS, the 250gb Buffalo LinkStation. Three years later I quadrupled my NAS space by replacing the LinkStation with the 1TB Buffalo LinkStation Live. It’s now been five years since my last NAS upgrade and this time I decided to finally go with RAID. Sticking with Buffalo (I have …

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Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition

A few weeks ago I got a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition (whew, what a mouthful!) at work to replace my aging (stuck on iOS 5.1.1) first generation iPad. We’re considering switching from iPads and Windows laptops to Android tablets for our mobile users and so those of us in IT are getting a first …

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Alton Brown Live! The Edible Inevitable Tour

My apologies to Alton Brown … apparently I am cursed when it comes to attending his live shows. Back in 2009 I went to the “Good Eats Turns 10” live show in Atlanta. In that show was a trivia segment that had (pre-selected) people from the audience come up on stage. One of the participants …

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WIJFR: Year Zero

Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 …

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Epson Expression Home XP-410 and Canon imageCLASS MF4890dw printers

Although there was nothing technically wrong with my trusty workhorse Epson AcuLaser CX11NF color laser printer/scanner/fax machine, it was over 7 years old and I was starting to be disappointed with its color quality, speed, and general noise. Rather than replace it with another color laser printer, I decided to go with dual printers: a …

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