Microsoft Introduces a Challenger to the iPad
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/technology/microsoft-unveils-a-tablet-to-challenge-the-ipad.html Another quarter, another iPad competitor. But the headline is misleading. I watched the announcement....
View ArticleMobile mapping isn’t good enough
Today I confronted a limitation of Google Maps. I’m in Buena Park and I need to be in downtown LA around 8AM. Last night, I consulted Google Maps on my iPhone for planning purposes. It answered 31...
View ArticleScale is hard: gmail edition
Sometime on or about August 8th, IMAP access to Gmail stopped working for me. I don’t depend on Gmail so I ignored the error messages for 6 days. Then I simulated an IMAP session and was able to...
View ArticleAdventures in legacy software
Today I opened M.Y.O.B. accounting files from 1999-2001. The files cannot be upgraded because they experienced some data corruption. The only way to access the files is to run the versions of M.Y.O.B....
View ArticleWhich mobile phone carrier?
I have 4 lines with AT&T and am less than pleased. While data speeds are excellent, any call longer than 20 minutes will drop at least once. Coverage at my house is poor. AT&T’s voice quality...
View ArticleNolisting
Nolisting is a spam fighting technique that works by listing an unavailable MX as the highest priority (lowest MX value) mail server. The idea is that any proper mailer will detect the unavailable MX...
View Articlemonitoring exim with nagios
I was setting up monitoring of mail queues with the nagios plugin check_mailq and found it didn’t work on cPanel servers. Google led me to a few shell scripts that used sudo to run exim -bpc. I didn’t...
View ArticleCorsair SSD + Mac = pain
Until recently, having a 3 year old laptop was unthinkably slow. Yet today I find myself with a mid-2010 MacBook Pro. Not long ago, RAM and processors leapt past the point of being good enough. My...
View ArticleHow domain registrations were done in 1996
Received: from ic.net (falcon.ic.net [152.160.101.1]) by ops.internic.net (8.7.4/InterNIC-RS) with SMTP id CAA03959 for ; Fri, 12 Apr 1996 02:12:39 -0400 (EDT) Received: from michweb.net by ic.net with...
View ArticleDKIM and mailing lists
I recently deployed DKIM on a number of my domains. For those readers of my blog that are unfamiliar with DKIM (Hi Mom and Dad, I love you.), DKIM is just a fancy way to stamp emails with a special …...
View ArticleGeeky things to do with DMARC
May 25th edition. Between 2013-05-24 17:00:00 and 2013-05-25 16:59:59, somebody at the United States Army base in Fort Huachuca, Arizona (home of the “U.S. Army Intelligence Center and the U.S. Army...
View ArticleLED light bulbs
The graph above from Seattle City Light shows 12 months of our household electric usage (Jun-May). Each bar is 2 months, so the first is Jun-Jul and the last is Apr-May. The lighter colored left bar is...
View ArticleeGallon
The eGallon is a new and more comprehensible way to compare the fuel costs of gas versus electric cars. The eGallon is the cost of driving an electric car the equivalent distance that a gas powered car...
View Articlethe ROI on LED
Did you do a break even analysis yet? How long will it take you to recoup the expense? The way to calculate break even (or Return On Investment) is to know roughly how much each bulb costs to use. To …...
View ArticleA use for jet skis
As an early birthday present, Jen bought me an hour ride on a Flyboard. It’s an awfully fun way to fly.
View ArticleAT&T cramming: Part 2
In 2011, a miscreant abused AT&T’s Wireless Access Protocol payment system and add unauthorized charges to my account. When I noticed the charges, I called AT&T. After getting the initial “we...
View Articlethe best oven mitts
After 17 years of service, my oven mitts are retiring to file 13. Since they last so long, it’s worth getting the best replacements. My research concluded that the competition is a dead heat between...
View ArticleSynology for FreeBSD backups
How I configured a Synology NAS as a backup server, using NFS and AMD on FreeBSD. Continue reading →
View ArticleLong Range Leaf: driving to Meany Lodge
Can our 2013 Nissan Leaf make it from Seattle to Meany Lodge on a single charge? The distance from our house is 77 miles and the nominal Leaf range is 84 miles. The key factor on this trip is...
View ArticleFriends don’t let friends use GoDaddy
Today I received a phone call from GoDaddy. The representative inquired if I was still using the three SSL certificates that I purchased in 2007. I confirmed that I was. He then told me that since they...
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