Editorial

Confronting an Apple Watch Counterfeit Ring: Part 1

Can you spot a fake? This week I learned the hard way how difficult this is. Using Kijiji – an online marketplace considered a ‘grey market’ for new and used physical items – I bought a brand new Apple Watch Series 6. This Watch was posted as new and sealed in the box for $450.00, a price I haggled down to $420.00. The practice of selling close Apple Watches is common, but the work made to present this product as new and legitimate is unique. I investigated this phenomenon while ending up with two excellent duplicates, $420.00 poorer and in a confrontation with a scammer.

Reviews

Reviewing InvoiceNinja 5 Self-Hosted

It’s been a whirlwind year working with InvoiceNinja 5, a web-based accounting package you can run in the cloud, or on your own server (self-hosting). Think of it as Freshbooks, but running on your own servers. I’ve run through self-hosting every version available, testing with dummy data, pulling out my hair, migrating from Quickbooks and […]

Reviews

AirTags: A Short Review

Tile, Apple’s direct product competition, makes a more mature product with more sizes and more market share. Apple is probably going to do what it’s done a number of times before: Arrive on the scene with an “okay” product and completely decimate the competition. With tight integration into iOS, name recognition, pent-up demand for Apple-branded newness, and just an Apple high right now, expect AirTags to be a winner. Tile is going to have more features, call Apple anti-competitive, team up with others while fighting the good fight.

How-To

Updating Docker containers safely

For anyone who runs one or more docker applications, a huge challenge is to keep containers running smoothly with updated images. You could force updates with tools like Watchtower, but these may just automatically break your applications. Here are some of the ways I make sure docker applications stay up-to-date while failing as little as possible. This only covers docker run/create and docker-compose (for now). Here’s what I do.