Posts

I assume most of you didn’t already know this, so I’m going to clarify it up front. One of my favorite sci-fi trilogies is comprised of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Obviously they weren’t meant to stand alone as a trilogy as they are three movies plucked out of a larger group of films, but I don’t care. They share a coherent story arc between them which begins with the second film and is resolved at the end of the fourth film. There are parts of these movies that inspire much debate among Trekkies, but as a whole, short of a few exceptions like the Matrix trilogy, they are my favorites. ...

Anybody who has spent any amount of time reading my content over the past few years knows what my small server project is. For those of you not in the know, it was basically my attempt to stop using an old desktop as my home server and transition all of its duties to SBCs (Single Board Computers) which are smaller, quieter, cooler, less performant and most importantly, use way less power. That project was a success. I eventually ended up with four ODroid XU4Qs handling various tasks. After I finished that project I started to get more ambitious. Could I actually take this project to the next level and curtail the power usage of my home office? ...

Over the last few months, I have been having trouble with the stability of my home internet connection. This became evident to me while live streaming to Twitch as my stream would begin dropping a lot of frames in a really short amount of time. For a time, recycling the power on the cable modem would make a positive difference, but after a few months that stopped working reliably. This post is about my subsequent experience trying to write a scheduled cron job that would let me know whenever my internet connection was having issues. ...

In today’s world with everything either burning or smoldering, it can be distressing to wake up each day and face the latest developments. Everything that is happening now is happening because, like the Empires of yesteryear, systems rise and they fall. The sad truth is that most people have developed a blind spot when it comes to issues of this sort. That’s primarily because getting there requires a bigger picture perspective most people seem to lack. ...

Whether we like to admit it or not, we all have boundaries. Part of growing older is being able to identify and knowing how to address our boundaries. Sometimes we find ways to transcend those boundaries and other times we discover, often as part of a painful journey, that these boundaries are in fact more permanent than we realized. I’ve got a couple stories about my encounters with my own boundaries that I’m going to share you all today. While they both “end” differently in a sense, the reality is that neither tale has actually completed. Both are still ongoing and ever-present experiences for me in ways that I hope you’ll better understand by the end of this post. ...

So here I am sitting in an AirBnb on Christmas Eve in North Augusta on my laptop while Annette is watches Wheel of Fortune as she likes to do on weeknights. Inside I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for a full day of Christmas related events and visits with various in-laws tomorrow and thought to myself, “This would be a great time to spew out a new blog post.” Dare I say that your opinion on that may clash with mine after you finish reading what I have to say. It’s Christmas related and as with most topics I’m going to make a lot of powerful statements which I may or may not choose to back up with any real degree of supporting information. Though in this case, I probably won’t be providing a lot of links and references as most of this post is likely going to consist of me preaching and I simply don’t have enough time to make this a proper essay. So if you like my typical content, you may want to just skip this one. Whatever you ultimately choose to do, consider yourself warned. ...

So over the years I’ve had a number of people tell me that I tend to focus on the negative aspects rather than the positive aspects of situations. This feedback has been relayed to me on both professional and personal levels. Let me tell you: That this is absolutely the case. However I don’t see it as a failing so much as an asset. The purpose of today’s post is to both delve into why I feel this way and why clients, co-workers and compatriots feel the way they do. ...

So in light of the exceptionally serious posts that have graced the front page of this site over the last month I have decided to do something a little different today. Consider this my official attempt to remind you all that I am actually capable of doing something other than bitching about the behavior of corporations and people. The topic of conversation today will be the MiSTer and why I’m absolutely enthralled with it. ...

This post marks the third in my series about the sad saga of Purism and the Librem 5. If you haven’t read the first or second posts yet, I highly recommend that you click here and then click here. Give them both at least a quick skim before reading this one as they contain important background information that is required to appreciate this one. After mulling over everything I had seen along with what my source had shared with me, I decided that I had a moral duty to spread the word as far and as wide as possible while protecting the identity of my source as best as I could. I resolved that the best way to do this would be to create threads with specific questions directed towards Purism which would help to shed some light on some the questions I now had. I created two threads, one on the Purism forums and one in the Purism subreddit. ...

This post marks the second in my series about the sad saga of Purism and the Librem 5. If you haven’t read the first post yet, I highly recommend that you click here. Give it at least a good skim before reading this one as it contains important background information that is required to appreciate this one. Sometime in the midst of the Aspen shipping window I began to casually express skepticism on the Purism subreddit. In some of my comments I posited the theory that Purism had hit rough financial straits. I also further theorized that Purism was using PR to generate more revenue in the form of pre-orders for the device so that the project could continue. Within a day of posting this, I was contacted by an informed ex-employee of Purism. They gave me their credentials which I verified using information they provided and information I was able to dig up. My source has decided not to go public yet at the time of publication. This means that while I have verified their identity, I cannot share any information you would require to do so. ...