For those who act on the need to dump words into something resembling a book, they’ll be pen-to-paper purists or the type that I am: write it all out on a computer. Certainly, there are other options, but why in the hell would anyone type out a book using Dropbox and a smartphone? What I […]
The moment all this sunk in (see part 1), I felt a keen sense of desperation and finality. As someone who works in technology and is considered an expert by many – I felt a distinct sense of shame. How could I have let this happen? How could I have let them fool me? Coupled with my already careful nature, I’ve bought and sold online for more than a decade. It shouldn’t have happened. After allowing that feeling to marinate, I set out to investigate. I had to learn more and maybe catch these culprits.
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.
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 […]
HTTPS and TLS support for all websites is a worthy goal, but this push is also breaking the web. More than anything, people that shouldn’t ignore this seem to have blinders on.
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.
A year has come to an end, and with it, a year of reading. This year I’ve read more than 120 books published in several generations. Reading old, new, printed paper, electronic, or audiobook, I work hard to make use of a spare moment to dig in. With my reading, I’ve also tried to review books more here and most recently on Instagram at @cwlmedia. Reviews and not-taking, in general, can be challenging on the best of days, but doing it has helped me make better sense of books I read and pass on thoughts to others. So many of the books I choose to read are good, but some really do rise above and are worthy of more attention. So, without further delay, here are the best book I read this year.
The cloud isn’t always your friend. Google, for example, seems to imbue its entire system with pay-for-storage incentives. Two easy clicks and you can pay money just to hold onto older mail. But, maybe you don’t need them to store your old mail. Maybe you can do this on your own, simply and easily. You […]
Discourse is a popular forum tool available as a self-hosted open-source tool. It can be installed bare-metal on Linux, but the Docker installation is one that I found most interesting. Unlike most Docker-implemented tools, Discourse has a script that runs outside of the docker containers (on your base machine) to set up the tool. This monolithic script (./discourse-setup) seems to do many of the things that docker-compose does, but obviously worse. I’m no fan of doing things this way; especially when the base alternative is nowhere on their site. My challenge this time was to build a basic docker-compose.yml that would get Discourse running in a test environment. Here’s what I did.
If you use Unifi gear, you know that it can proliferate quite fast. Couple that with cameras, a second network for cameras, and you have a growing need for more Unifi controllers to manage devices. The best approach is to, uhm, unifi controllers into a cloud-based setup – but you can’t always do that. When controllers get isolated on networks, you may find that you’ve lost the administrator password for one. Here’s how you can reset it so long as you have root shell access to the machine running your controller.