In the summer of 1987 I was temporarily assigned to Kadena AB, Okinawa from my duty station at Misawa AB, Japan. During that summer a major typhoon hit the island of Okinawa. I will never forget the fury that nature can hurl at a city in the form of a typhoon. The service men and […]
Selenium is a Firefox plug-in that lets you record your web activity and save those actions as a script that you can then play back over and over again measuring and timing the results. It is very useful for testing web sites. Simply install the plugin, start the Selenium IDE (Tools/Selenium), point Firefox at the […]
Every now and then you run into a new solution or tool that revolutionizes the same work you have been doing for ages. As a UNIX and Linux Systems Administrator I edit a lot of text files, and vim has been my text editor of choice for decades. Well, I still use vim habitually, but […]
Mac OS X Keyboard Tricks: Use the Command (⌘) key (aka: splat or apple key) like you would a Control key in Windows (⌘c copies, ⌘v pastes, ⌘ Tab to switch between running apps, ⌘~ to switch between App WIndows inside one App) ⌘ Space brings up Spotlight Search with actually works wonderfully, Command-Space-Mai-Return starts […]
This is not new, but it is surprising how stuck we all can get in old habits, and we can miss out on some real time-savers. One such time-saver for systems administrators or anyone who must frequently run the same commands on several hosts is clustered ssh, some scripts for your desktop/laptop that allow you […]
I keep forgetting how to recover my preferences on my iPod classic after I rarely have to reset it, so I decided to capture them here in hopes it helps me (and others) recover after a reset. By the way, a reset is to toggle the hold slider on and then off, then press and […]
* Stay inside, or at least out of the wind, and layers of clothing * Open cabinet/cupboard doors under those sinks against exterior walls so warm air gets in and keeps pipes from freezing * a heating pad can fix a frozen pipe given enough time * turn on gas fireplaces while there is power […]
I am disappointed with the new Virginia State Board of Elections website design. It should be easy for voters to figure out their voting place without putting any more personal information than an address. That this website would even attempt to collect last four of SSN and Voter ID number is insulting and a huge […]
This is a much more secure, if a little more annoying, way to protect your AppleID. Since there is real money involved with your iTunes and App Store purchases now, I strongly recommend you set up two-step authentication on your own AppleID. I recommend you go to appleid.apple.com and Manage your Account, then take 10 […]
I am less than thrilled with iTunes 11, and am trying to figure out how to use it for all the same functions I enjoyed with earlier versions of iTunes. A lot of this is simply look and feel and slowly growing accustomed to new style and process, but in the interim I can make […]
