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—- Cross Post from the Spec Ops Technology Blog —- Spec Ops Technology prides itself on taking difficult problems and providing practical engineering solutions. Quite often this real world experience is born of a real world problem we personally faced. There is a passion we look for in our engineers that breeds a team that, by nature, develops creative fixes. As the United and Lufthansa ticket counters can attest, I spend a lot of time on the road. In today’s connected world I depend on a secure and platform agnostic internet connection. There a few major hurdles that make this difficult: ...

Apple must have been reading my blog when I wrote-up how to use two locations for Time Machine. Now in Mountain Lion it is built in and is much more seamless than my band-aid hack. Backups were always such an elusive concept for people, but Apple has really done a great job here. If you own a Mac and do not use Time Machine…shame… The two locations here are a Whole Disk Encrypted external FW drive and a Debian file server with an encrypted volume. ...

TL;DR – Sometimes the smallest laptop isn’t the best option for a traveler. If you live on one machine then maybe sucking up the weight for power isn’t a bad idea. If you have a tablet then there is no question My apologies to my blog readers for two things: That my blog has not been updated in N+1 more months than it should have That it has taken a very travel oriented slant as of late I blame both on starting an international engineering firm, but it has forced me to change my habits (what do you mean I don’t have time to blog on only 4 hours of sleep!?!) and learn to get smarter with my travel. ...

It is highly infuriating to be a security person and have your own house knocked down. This was the case if you visited my site as of late and found broken links and spam spewed across it. This was not due to my own security mishaps. This website is: Scanned daily by WSD Security script Multifactor authenticated with a Yubikey for all logins and edits Weekly backup sent to offsite Strong passwords across the board Check for updates weekly and subscribe to security lists As we say in the security world if you lock the doors, but leave the windows open your security is not that strong. Hence was the case with my hosted site here. I locked the doors, but dreamhost left wide-open the windows. I have been a paying customer since 2007 and will now be looking for a new host. Here is the hack below: ...

Contents 1 Home Screen: 2 Productivity: 3 Finance: 4 Travel: 5 Transportation: 6 Personal: 7 Share this: I think I was one of the first to carry around a smartphone. I remember the marriage of a phone and PDA made me so excited and to see that technology in a single device…phew…love. The Treo 180 was severely limited, but it brought to the world an idea that phones were for more than phone calls. Fast forward a decade and now I can run the entire company from a smart phone. Out of all the travel gadgets I carry, my smart phone is the one most necessary. I wanted to run through my favorite apps that make it happen. ...