Another Game 7 heartbreaker

It was fantastic watching the Cleveland Indians in the 2016 World Series. Unfortunately, after taking a 3 games to 1 lead over the Chicago Cubs, they lost three in a row, including a Game 7 heartbreaker in Cleveland that ended in the 10th inning. The Cavaliers lost to Golden State in the 2015 NBA Finals and then came back to beat the Warriors and win it all in 2016 (after being down 3-1). I’m hopeful for an Indians/Cubs rematch in 2017 that has a similar turnaround of events.

Still, it was a great season. It was tough seeing what felt like the entire country (including Joe Buck) get behind the “cursed” Cubs with their best record in baseball, but the Indians were always the underdogs and had to overcome a lot of adversity (injuries, etc.) to accomplish what they did. That says a lot to the fans.

Spring Training is going to be a lot of fun next spring! I’m already looking forward to March …

The Indians are the American League Champs!

Indians AL Champs!

Incredible! For the first time since 1997 my hometown Indians are going back to the World Series! I’m in Denver on a last-minute, 9 day business trip so I had to “watch” the game via ESPN notifications on my phone, so it doesn’t quite feel real. I can only imaging the energy in Cleveland right now. First the Cavs, now this.

GO TRIBE!!!!

Indians clinch!

Here’s something I haven’t had the chance to post in a long time: my hometown Cleveland Indians clinched the American League Central division title for the first time since 2007!

Indians clinch AL Central

My Tampa Bay Rays were unfortunately dead last in the East, but Cleveland baseball in October, yeah! Go Tribe!

Labor Day Weekend 2016 at Disney: Day 4

Happy Labor Day!

My wife and I work up early and let my daughter sleep in. To get some extra exercise, we walked around the Polynesian along the beach and took the trail over to the nearby Grand Floridian resort. We’d always seen the wedding chapel from the monorail but took this opportunity to check around the grounds. It definitely has some scenic views of Cinderella’s castle across the lagoon from the chapel and outdoor flower arch in the back. Back at our room after the walk, our daughter was still asleep (teenagers!) so we decided to take the monorail over to the Magic Kingdom to catch the park opening ceremony. This is something we’ve always wanted to do but never seemed to arrive on time. It was neat watching all the characters arrive on the train and greet the family selected to help open the park after a big countdown.

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Labor Day Weekend 2016 at Disney: Day 3

Traditionally we would do the resort pool and Disney Springs on Monday before heading home, but we decided to mix things up this year. No early plans today so we slept in and spent the morning at the resort, enjoying the Polynesian’s two pools after grabbing a light breakfast from the concierge lounge. The pools and waterslides were fun and my daughter enjoyed using my underwater camera to take photos and movies. I’m sure I got a few strange looks swimming around with a camera strapped to my arm, heh. After enjoying some malasades from the Oasis Bar, we cleaned up, dressed, and drove over to Disney Springs to do a little shopping.

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Labor Day Weekend 2016 at Disney: Day 2

This morning we woke up early, checked out of our hotel, and drove over to Hollywood Studios to get there in time for the park opening. We found they were already letting people through the gates, stopping the crowds just short of Hollywood Boulevard. Without any fanfare or opening ceremony, suddenly the park was open and the crowd was streaming in two directions: to the right towards the Aerosmith Rockin’ Roller Coaster and the Tower of Terror; and straight ahead to Toy Story Mania. A line of Disney cast members kept the surging crowd to a slow walking speed. I overheard a cast member saying they had to start doing this to prevent people from flat out running and getting trampled!

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Labor Day Weekend 2016 at Disney: Day 1

Time for our annual family vacation to Walt Disney World over the Labor Day Weekend! With school starting early this year (back on August 10th) it seemed like we had to wait a lot longer for our end-of-summer trip.

This year our vacation was threatened by Hurricane Hermine which passed through our area yesterday and today. School was cancelled both days and I ended working from home yesterday and taking today off. We had a lot of wind and rain, but luckily nothing too bad in our immediate neighborhood. Once we received word that the Friday night high school football games were also cancelled, we decided to head over to Orlando early, hopeful that Hermine would cross the state quickly and leave the rest of the weekend alone.

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Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X

“Infrastructures are essential to everyday life, but they are always the supporting player, never the goal. It is only when there is trouble that the infrastructure is noticed …” -Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer

Ubiquiti ER-X

There was nothing wrong with my almost 5-year old Buffalo router, but after hearing Steve Gibson talk about the $50 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X on episode #569 of the Security Now! podcast, I knew it was time to replace the Buffalo.

Unlike most consumer/home routers, the ER-X has no built-in wireless. It’s a router, not an access point. This wasn’t a problem for me since I hadn’t been using the Buffalo for wireless since I had put in the Ubiquity UniFi AP two years ago (and now my AP and new router are from the same manufacturer). Also unlike your average consumer router, the ER-X has five logical interfaces behind its five physical ports (eth0 – eth4). This means you can configure the individual ports however you want. Each port can be its own separate subnet, you can group ports into a switch, bridge ports, etc. (I’m using the traditional 1 WAN port (eth0) plus 4 switched ports (eth1 – eth4) setup). The ER-X can be powered with the included AC brick, or via (non-standard, not 802.3af) 24V passive PoE input on eth0 (which can then do PoE passthru to eth4 to power, say, a UniFi AP). For now I’m using the AC adapter and not PoE.

For the past 9 years I’ve run DD-WRT on my home routers but now, with the ER-X, I’m learning Ubiquiti’s EdgeOS. It’s got a pretty slick interface, although not all of the router’s features are available to configure through the GUI (like setting up a PPTP VPN connection), so some command line interface (CLI) interaction is required. SSH’ing into the router and using the shell to set the more advanced options should be familiar to anyone with Linux experience (once you learn a few Ubiquiti-specific configuration commands).

The driving factor behind switching routers was attempting to re-organize my home network with three separate, isolated segments:

I’m still finalizing the configuration, but so far I’ve set up the three wireless SSIDs on the UniFi AP and tagged two of them (guest and IoT) with VLANs. On the ER-X, I created the two VLANs (on the switch), tagged them on eth4 (the port connected to the AP), set up DHCP servers for the three segments on 192.168.1.0, 192.168.5.0, and 192.168.10.0 and confirmed that the wireless devices on a VLAN get an IP address on the corresponding subnet.

I’ve been having some problems with the firewall setup, so I still have some items to get working:

  • allow pings from VLAN1 to VLAN10 (for Nagios monitoring)
    • update: I wasn’t able to get this working so I put the (previously unused) wireless adapter in my server on the VLAN10 network so it had access to ping devices on that network
  • guest devices on VLAN5 can’t find the UniFi controller on VLAN1 so they don’t load the captive guest portal
    • update: I gave up trying to get this to work. I tried all sorts of firewall rules and other suggestions from people on the EdgeMAX forums but just could not get unauthorized guest devices on VLAN5 to see the UniFi controller
  • learn how to write firewall rules for true subnet separation (except for the Nagios requirement above)
    • update: I got these working using this information as a baseline (along with help from EdgeMAX forum members). Basically I wrote two pairs of rules (one IN and one LOCAL for the guest and IoT VLANs) that prevent them from talking to the primary LAN and each other.
  • separate a wired device on eth2 to be part of VLAN10
    • update: after re-doing some setup from scratch, I got this working on eth1 by setting the PVID to 10 for that port in switch0
  • NAT hairpin/loopback for the VLANs
    • update: despite having switch0.5 added as a LAN interface on the Port Forwarding tab, enabling the “Hairpin NAT” checkbox, and suggestions from the EdgeMAX forums members (like DNAT rules) I cannot get devices on the guest VLAN5 to access local services (like access to this blog).

The ER-X is a pretty advanced device for $50 and I’m looking forward to learning more about advanced networking topics as I tweak it. Just so long as my family can deal with the home network going down a lot as I make mistakes. 🙂

Leaving Evernote for OneNote

I seem to be saying goodbye to a lot of long-used software this week … first Trillian, and now Evernote.

I’ve been an Evernote user since 2009, and a Premium annual subscriber since 2014. Their recent price increase announcement, however, would cause my $45/year subscription to jump to $70 next February when my renewal comes up. That steep of an increase started me wondering if I really needed a Premium subscription, or if I needed to continue to use Evernote at all. I keep a lot of stuff in Evernote, and have spent a significant amount of time maintaining and tweaking the data in it (like my recipes, home inventory, etc.) so I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to making a switch, but decided I should at least check out the alternatives.

The obvious replacement was Microsoft OneNote. I’m already paying about $80/year for my household Office 365 subscription, and started using OneNote heavily at work once I got my Surface Pro 3 in 2015 (and continue to do so with my Surface Pro 4). OneNote does all the same cloud syncing that Evernote does, supports multiple devices (like my iPhone), and has decent search and share capabilities, so I decided to give it a shot as my Evernote replacement.

Migrating was actually amazingly simple. Using Microsoft’s importer, I just had to select the Evernote notebooks I wanted to import, login to OneNote, and let the process run:

OneNote Importer

A short time later, I had all 1200+ notes in OneNote notebooks and sections (you can find more detailed migration instructions here and here). It’s not perfect, to be sure: my PDF attachments appear as attachments and printouts in the converted notes, tags are just #text in the notes so you can’t easily view a list of tagged documents) but it’s pretty close. I still have some cleanup to do and it’s only been a few days since my migration, but hopefully I don’t run into any major problem that makes me regret my decision.

Also, if you’re going to use OneNote heavily, I recommend checking out Onetastic.

A Farewell to Trillian

I’ve been a Trillian Pro user since 2004 but the time has come to drop my favorite cross-platform instant messaging client. Apparently Yahoo is shutting down the legacy servers that run the old Windows/Mac client versions of Yahoo Messenger (in favor of the web and mobile versions) on August 5 so Trillian will no longer work with that service. Couple that with a security breach on July 4 that resulted in the permanent shutdown of the Trillian user support forums and blog and I found it hard rationalize keeping the software installed. Now I’m glad I hadn’t yet paid to renew my Pro subscription for the new 6.0 version of the client.