A Geek’s View of Technology
By john on Oct 20, 2008 in Home Automation, featured | 0 Comments
I’m not dead! I am, however, VERY very busy and haven’t had too much time to keep up on here. I hope to be able to post more on here in the near future as things calm down a bit.
This weekend I had a sad thing happen. My smart home became an inexplicably dumb home. Suddenly my life was thrown into disarray when I pressed a button and….. nothing happened. I was left wondering what in the world happened.
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By john on Sep 9, 2008 in Apple, featured | 3 Comments
I’ve had the same home directory for a long time, migrating it and it’s data from one machine to another for years. In the process I’ve accumulated a lot of cruft that ballooned my home directory to a whopping 73.5GB of disk space. This was becoming a pain to manage, so I decided to freshen things up a bit. I chose to do this immediately following getting my XServe to behave with a bit more stability.
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By john on Sep 9, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
A long while back I acquired an Apple XServe for use in my home network. It was used, and definitely not new (sadly, not an Intel XServe), but still quite the powerful (and loud) machine! At the behest of my buddy I set it up as my gateway, providing VPN termination, firewall,DNS, nat, dhcp and OpenDirectory service. I agreed and we got Leopard Server installed and fully configured. It was cool, I will admit. Until it started crashing. Regularly.
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By john on Aug 6, 2008 in AT&T, Apple, featured | 0 Comments
It’s no surprise to many that my home network is more advanced than most. I’m a geek, it’s what we do. Over the past few weeks I’ve slowly been building out my home network - from it’s initial incarnation as a typical broadband home network with an airport extreme base station serving as my router and a DSL line for bandwidth. Then I added in-wall structured wiring for gigabit ethernet throughout the house, which was awesome. Then I added a 12U server cabinet in my garage ( the terminal point for the structured wiring, and location of my patch panel ) that houses 2 older Apple XServes, a UPS, a gigabit switch and 3 dell Poweredge 850 servers.
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By john on Jul 30, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
With the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 software update, and launch of the 3G iPhone (I’ll have one soon), Apple also launched the App Store, where 3rd party applications are sold and distributed for the platform. This is a wonderful thing as it creates a slick, clean, one stop shop for applications to run natively on my mobile device. The list of applications available continues to grow and several that are incredibly useful (and some that WILL be incredibly useful) are available there. Unfortunately, while the idea of the App store is great, and some aspects of it’s current incarnation are really awesome, it still needs some refining.
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By john on Jul 25, 2008 in Apple, Microsoft, featured | 2 Comments
The company I work for gave me a Blacberry 8830 “World Phone” not long after I started here. I’d love to say I was thrilled, but I’d be lying. I don’t necessarily have anything against BlackBerry, I just don’t really like them all that much.
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By john on Jul 22, 2008 in Apple, Wordpress, featured | 0 Comments
Earlier today one of the iPhone apps I’ve been waiting for hit the app store, Wordpress.
I’ve been waiting for it simply so I could have a method of bloging on the go, wherever I happen to be when an idea strikes me.
I’m giving it a shot right now, in fact, and think it’s pretty sweet for what it does. It won’t let you manage the blogging platform, but you can create and edit posts - which if you ask me is plenty for a mobile app. The rest I can wait to be in front of a computer for.
Another App I am anxiously waiting for is the highly anticipated 1password - I’m a huge fan of the desktop version and am very excited for the iPhone version.
Both apps are ( will be ) free downloads to boot.
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By john on Jul 18, 2008 in featured | 0 Comments
Last week I wrote about how a company I had contracted to do the structured wiring in my house had failed to show up, costing me time and money.
I got ahold of them earlier this week and they claim they left me messages (whether or not I believe that claim I will keep to myself), and said they could do the install Thursday (yesterday). I reluctantly agreed - but mostly because I wanted it done, and preferred it be done before this weekend (when I’m moving my servers in to their new home and finalizing that portion of my home network).
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By john on Jul 18, 2008 in Home Security, featured | 4 Comments
I’ve had my home security system for a few weeks now, and let me just say - I still love it. While I have had some minor issues with sensor placement, the company (FrontPoint) has been very good, thorough and fast about resolving the issues and helping me be sure I’m getting the best coverage possible.
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By john on Jul 11, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
Today is the long awaited release day for the iPhone 3G, as well as the day when MobileMe finally shows up and is accessible (while some were able to get to it yesterday, I was not amongst them). It’s also supposedly the release date for the iPhone 2.0 software update release, though an unofficial leaked version was available early yesterday. A few brave souls decided to take the plunge and install the unofficial version - I’m not that daring, especially with a major update like this. And of course, the much anticipated App Store is now officially online as well.
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