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Testing out Ipernity
Earlier this week, Yahoo! unveiled a new and improved Flickr! !! A radical new redesign, which, while kind of slick to look at, totally steamrolls all the narrative features that many Flickr users like...
View ArticleAnd So It Goes . . .
You would think that turning a computer off would be a simple ask. But on my corporate laptop, Windows 7 is ever concerned that I am an idiot. Me: Okay, we’re done. Shut down. Windows 7: Okay. Hey,...
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Flickr Provides Old Users with “Closure”
Thea Lamkin, from Flickr’s customer support, has been busy. At long last, we are getting some clarity from Yahoo: “Hit the road, Jack!” I am hearing the following: - you want the option to see...
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Redundant BART Employees on Strike
A reaction I posted to a friend’s Facebook with regard to the present BART Strike: I’m a pro-Union Liberal who thinks it is wrong to beat up on public-sector employees. I have heard that BART staff get...
View ArticleFitbit Feedback: My Own Data Are Not a “Premium” Feature
Feedback to Fitbit: Hello, I have for a long time wanted to be able to download my data. It seems simple: I buy a device to track my data, I should have access to the data collected. It looks like now...
View ArticleMy Very Own Font
Thanks to a tip from kk.org, I recently had the fun of “building” a custom hand-written font, using PaintFont.com. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers set forth upon this continent a new...
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Notes From Atlassian Summit 2013
Two weeks ago, I attended Atlassian Summit 2013 in San Francisco. This is an opportunity to train, network, and absorb propaganda about Atlassian products (JIRA, Greenhopper, Confluence, &c.) and...
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A Computer Telephone Without a Keyboard!?
At long last, I retired my old T-Mobile G2. It was the last in a long line of phones I have owned for the past decade with a physical keyboard. (I think I owned every Sidekick up to the 3 before going...
View ArticleTest of Android Voice Dictation
In honor of Benjy Feen, a test of Android’s speech-to-text capability: Original Text Transcribed Text We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I...
View ArticlePhishing: Chinese Domain Registration
Here is a new phishing attack that made it through to Gmail about the domain name dispute around tjldme . . . ?!! Dear Manager, (If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this...
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How Many Calories in a Bowl of Cereal?
I started trying to use Fitbit to track calorie consumption again the other day. This gets frustrating pretty fast because unless you only eat processed food from packages of specific size you mostly...
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FAQ: Should I Change All My Passwords!!??
As a SysAdmin, people ask me how much they need to worry over the heartbleed vulnerability. Here’s my own take: Google were known to be vulnerable. They co-discovered the vulnerability and deployed...
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Elevated Trains
Forney engine pulls Lake Street Elevated Railroad train over Lake Street in Chicago, 1893. Thanks, Chuckman!!
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New Phishing Scam: Call Toll Free to Refresh Your IP Address!
I reported the following to the FBI, to LogMeIn123.com, to Century Link, and to Bing, and now I’ll share the story with you. Yesterday, May 12, 2014, a relative was having trouble with Netflix. So she...
View ArticleVMWare Fusion: Fixed Resolution Across Different Screens
Apple ships some nice hardware, but the Mac OS is not my cup of tea. So, I run Ubuntu (kubuntu) within VMWare Fusion as my workstation. It has nice features like sharing the clipboard between host and...
View ArticleWindows 8 Is a Horrible Horrible Operating System
I had the worst experience at work today: I had to prepare a computer for a new employee. That’s usually a pretty painless procedure, but this user was to be on Windows, and I had to … well, I had to...
View ArticleHOWTO: Develop Software Agilely
There seems to be some backlash going on against the religion of “Agile Software Development” and it is best summarized by PragDave, reminding us that the “Agile Manifesto” first places “Individuals...
View ArticleAWS: Glacier Restores Can Get Pricey
I have been working with AWS to automate disaster recovery. Sync data up to S3 buckets (or, sometimes, EBS) and then write Ansible scripts to deploy a bunch of EC2 instances, restore the data,...
View ArticleIT Strategy: Lose the Religion
High Scalability asks “What Ideas in IT Must Die?” My own response . . . I have been loath to embrace containers, especially since I attended a conference that was supposed to be about DevOps but was...
View ArticleWindows 10
The other day I figured to browse Best Buy. I spied a 15″ Toshiba laptop, the kind that can pivot the screen 180 degrees into a tablet. With a full sized keyboard. And a 4k screen. And 12GB of RAM. For...
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