For Father’s Day I got an Amazon Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated smart home speaker. You may know it (her?) as Alexa. If you’ve followed the blog, or even just glanced at it, you know I love tech gadgets and am also no stranger to dabbling in home automation so the Echo has been a fun toy to play …
Ah, April. The Stanley Cup Finals have started and my Tampa Bay Lightning have already advanced to round 2. The NBA Finals have also started and my Cleveland Cavaliers are looking to sweep the Pistons on Sunday and move on to the conference semi-finals. We’re about a month into the new baseball season and both …
A recent server upgrade (to Ubuntu 16.04) that included PHP 7.0 seems to have broken WordPress. I’m working on it!
You may notice something different about ‘chmod 644’ today … a green HTTPS padlock in your browser’s address bar. That’s because my domain is now using an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. The Let’s Encrypt project is a certificate authority (CA) that aims to bring free and open encryption to the web. I first heard about …
The latest Fast Ring Insider Preview build of Windows 10 (14316) includes the new Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that Microsoft announced at their Build conference last week. I have to admit, I kind of enjoy being able to open a bash prompt on my PC and using Linux commands to interact with the file system, …
At work we’ve been using Microsoft’s Surface Pro since its original release and it has been our standard issue laptop since last year, starting with the Surface Pro 3. Moving forward, we’ve starting deploying the latest Surface Pro 4 with Windows 10. I’ve been using the SP4 for the past week as my primary machine in …
I’m not sure how I let late October pass by without upgrading my Linux server! Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) was released back on October 22 and somehow (still not sure how) I completely missed it. So today I did the first ‘do-release-upgrade’ on the NUC (since I clean installed Vivid back in July). This one was pretty smooth, …
Now that I had finished building my PiDP-8 I needed something for the Raspberry Pi B+ in it to do other than just flash the blinkenlights. I can’t remember how I first heard about it, but for the past two weeks I’ve been running a DNS-based ad-blocker utility called Pi-Hole.
I’m a computer guy, and while I’m not quite old enough to have first-hand experience with classic golden age hardware like the PDP-8, I spent a good deal of time in college working on the VAX, still own my first computer, and have an appreciation for those forefathers of the amazing PCs and servers we use …
It’s Windows 10 release day! The free upgrade for qualified devices is now available to the general public. I’ve been using Microsoft’s latest desktop OS since the first Technical Preview was released for Windows Insiders last October, mainly on my old original Surface Pro 1 just to get a jump on learning the new software …