Techie

After the unfortunate loss of my 2014 Nexus 7 tablet I was on the prowl for a replacement. I prefer to keep an Android tablet due to the flexibility to use it as a mini Linux workstation if the need arises. The USB OTG support means the tablet is capable of taking on most of the tasks I use my Linux laptop with in the event I am stuck somewhere. Additionally I wanted a tablet that really excelled at media consumption as that is the primary use for a tablet in my workflow. ...

Introduction The idea of keeping a production and development network always wears on me. Unless the change management is in place to offer some assurances that both threads are kept exactly in sync, they inevitably turn into a game of not good enough to buy down risk. That was the rationale behind creating a system that allowed rapid captures of running machines, transitioning to a closed network, and with no changes to the network/systems have them be as they were just minutes earlier. Thanks to technology from EMC, Cisco, VMware, and VyOS this is all very possible. ...

I am always in search of products that help me automate and secure my home. I have run a mix of Foscam, D-Link, and Panasonics cameras dumping to a Linux server for the longest time, but it was clunky and not without its horrendous maintenance. Additionally the cameras, as aptly pointed out by Wife, were less than aesthetically pleasing. ...

In order to make full use of my half-duplex WiMAX link, I started looking for anything and everything I could use to optimize it. Linux has some pretty decent utilities with iproute2 and netem to handle these type of configurations. They don’t compare to OpenBSD’s PF, but they work once you get the setup in place. Due in part to how ugly TC is out of the box, I really like FireQOS for defining the basic configuration. The developer also makes a great iptables wrapper called FireHOL, but iptables rules are easy enough to write in my opinion. ...

I live in the boonies now, but thankfully we have some semblance of broadband with SpeedConnect. It is a WiMax setup with a modem that needs to be reset once a day (sometimes more if I am downloading ISO’s) and only connects at 10Mb Half-Duplex. Better than nothing I suppose. Originally I just succom to needing to wake-up, hit the head, and then hit the server room to pull the power. The geek in me couldn’t take it. Enter an extra Wemo Insight I had lying around. Initially I attempted to set up a rule that reset the switch (and thereby the modem) and coincide that with a cron script to bring down and back up the connection. ...