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{ Category Archives } Personal

iPhone 6s battery refurb is only $49 until the end of June

If you are still enjoying an iPhone 6s, be advised…. it becomes a “vintage” product on June 30th, 2022; so get it in for repairs/refurbishment before then if you want to keep using this fabulous model.

Leave Facebook Now

Facebook (specifically Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg) knew that Russians were manipulating American voters in June of 2016, and not only did they abstain from trying to stop the blatant manipulation, they denied it was happening at all. They lied. The entire platform is designed for exactly this sort of manipulation. Leave now. Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-stamos.html […]

Outer Banks

Apologies to those of you whom I scoffed at when you told me you could surf North Carolina’s outer banks. I was wrong, you most certainly can! I recently visited Kill Devil Hills, NC with some buddies from high school and enjoyed some damned good food and good beaches and wind and waves. I watched […]

Still happy with my 2006 Prius

My trusty 2006 Prius is still going strong. On a back from North Carolina’s Outer Banks I managed to average 54.2MPG over 336 miles (admittedly mostly highway miles and it was nice enough to need neither AC nor heat). Changing the HID Zenon D4R bulbs was much easier than I expected as well. $28 for […]

Protecting yourself after the Equifax personal information leaks

The Equifax leak of our personal information is particularly harmful; it makes identity theft of most credit holding Americans trivially easy for the rest of their lives. Not for just one year, but until we pass away. The problem is that the information leaked is all the personal details that do not change. Steve Rubin […]

Career Change

Friday, March 31st, was my last day at a job I have absolutely loved for three amazing years. Cvent is a great place to work, and they will have an opening for a Linux/Windows systems engineer. I highly recommend this position with a great team and many excellent learning opportunities in a truly integrated DevOps […]

A personal message about the importance of backing up your data

Woo hoo! Time Machine to the rescue. My personal laptop, work laptop, and Dreamhost shell account all auto-sync a few personal data files of very useful data between them… This morning I corrupted one instance and that corruption was synchronized, wiping out all the work in all three locations… Thankfully I have two redundant backup […]

Vegetable Garden, 2016

Having a gently warm spring weekend has encouraged me to start on the garden this year; so far I am just tilling the soil with an old garden fork and thinking about how best to prevent deer and rabbit from eating everything. Remaining from prior years is a little Rosemary, a lot of Oregano, the […]

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AppleTV (4th Generation) with tvOS

I am testing a new (4th generation, Oct 2015) AppleTV as a replacement for my 2nd generation AppleTV (Sep 2010). My initial impression is overwhelmingly positive! I am finally replacing the older AppleTVs entirely. I was an early adopter, got my first AppleTV (Silver, ran stripped version of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger with FrontRow) […]

If you use “home sharing” do NOT upgrade to iOS 8.4

So, my own fault for not reading the fine print, but one of my favorite features of iOS vanishes with iOS 8.4 – the “home sharing” of music on a single WiFi network. Specifically, iOS 8.4 clients can no longer connect to a shared music library on the local network for Music playback (Video playback […]