Back in February I read about Home Assistant on a TCF thread. At the time, before I knew a lot about it, I thought maybe it could be used to make the setup of my TiVo Control skill for Alexa a little easier. That turned out not to be necessarily true, but I did learn about …
I’ve been pretty happy with my UniFi UAP, but it never quite reached to the far corners of the house, and the fact that it only had a 100mbps uplink kinda bothered me. So this weekend I replaced it with a new Ubiquity UniFi UAP-AC-LR.
Over Christmas vacation I had a network outage that left me without remote access to my home network for a week. While I was at my in-laws, unable to connect to my server or cameras, I started researching options for out-of-band management of my home network. I started with cellular devices like this, but they all …
In case you hadn’t noticed (and if not, why not? 😉 ), windracer.net was down for the past week. This was because my cable modem decided to lock up just hours after I left town for Christmas in north Florida with family. I called Spectrum (formerly Brighthouse Networks) from my in-laws’ house hoping they could …
Continue reading ‘A week without remote access … (the blog is back!)’ »
I was doing a bit of a network re-org and realized that the old MoCA adapter that connects my home office to the network was only a 100mbps ethernet connection. Since everything else on my network is now gigabit (except for the occasional exception like my PiDP-8), I decided to upgrade to ActionTec’s ECB6200 MoCA adapters. …
“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 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 …
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 …
Last week at work we received a pair of Netgear ProSafe gigabit managed click switches (the 8-port GSS108E and 16-port GSS116E) to outfit a conference room. I was impressed with the mounting options and after seeing the 8-port one was less than $50 on Amazon, I decided to get one for my home office. The GSS108E replaced …
After over 11 years of faithful service as our primary family room TV, my 42″ Panasonic plasma died last week. Time to do some TV shopping! It’s hard to believe we’ve been using an ED (that’s right, 480P) television as our workhorse display for the past 11 years. When we bought it, we couldn’t quite …
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 …