So there’s a reason (or several) why your house isn’t wired for DC electrical operation. But there are a variety of situations in which you may want to add DC capability to your house — for example, off grid situations or if you want a house-wide 12V UPS backup.
Continue reading DC 12V UPS for your whole house – 12V Socket!
You may have wondered, how do I bridge DSL modems? I can’t be the only one…
When you go to your friendly neighborhood cable office or phone company to acquire DSL or DOCSIS services, the box that your ISP gives you is referred to in the industry as CPE or Customer Premises Equipment. Most Internet Service Provider technologies are asymmetric, which means that the upload and download rates are different (in addition to being on different frequencies).
Continue reading SDSL Bridging with the ZyXEL 782R G.SHDSL Router
I’ve just installed OwnCloud on my Debian server, and I’d like to take a few minutes to review its functionality and performance. For those who read my blog, you’ll know that I hate the word “Cloud.” However, OwnCloud has actually used the term properly, so they are forgiven.
OwnCloud is basically an open source Google Drive. Currently, it provides a similar level of functionality as DropBox, with several key differences. First, the payment structure is obviously fundamentally different. While an enterprise version and various subscriptions are available, the cost for the open source version is $0. The Desktop sync apps are based on open source libraries and are also available for free. The mobile apps for Android and iOS respectively cost $0.99, which I deem a very appropriate cost to offset the development costs and the “App Store Fees.” The extent of the cost you have to pay is for storage capacity, computers, and $1.98 for mobile apps. Continue reading OwnCloud Review plus Installation + Configuration Tutorial for Debian
Continuing on my cheap GSM phone binge, I’ve acquired a BLU Samba W.
There is very little information on the Samba W out there (of which some of the information is just downright incorrect) so I’ll try to start from the ground up. Even BLU’s website displays the phone but doesn’t let you click on it, nor does it appear to have a similarly named page as its other phones that you can’t guess the URL. Continue reading BLU Samba W (Q170W) Quad Band GSM Phone Review
Freshly arrived from it’s Chinese eBay padded mailer, behold the Aiek M3
The Aiek M3 is a quad band GSM phone which is exactly the same size as a credit card (but significantly thicker). It is the next generation following the older “real button” versions (M1 and M2) and instead uses some sort of capacitive touch key design. Continue reading Aiek M3 Credit Card Sized GSM Phone Review
My Utilite Pro has finally arrived! Admittedly it sat at my Mom’s house for a week before I finally booted it today, but I’m now ready to give my first impressions, plugged into a single ASUS 1920×1080 monitor.
Specs:
Pretty cool. Performance marginally better than an ARM Chromebook of similar cost.
It ships with Ubuntu 12.04 with XFCE (Does that make it Xubuntu?). Most notable issues are a bit of instability (random crash notifications) and media issues associated with it being ARMv7. For example, Google Chrome is not available for ARM and it ships instead with the open source Chromium browser (the open source Flash-less cousin of the Google version).
Trying to get YouTube to work:
If anyone has had success with getting this to work let me know. I’ll update this as I continue to use it.
Now that I’ve gotten your attention:
You’ve all heard the latest fetish in marketing speak:
“Our entire application is in the cloud, so that’s pretty cool. Want to work here?” Continue reading Why the phrase “in the cloud” should die
To assist several of my friends in setting up PGP, I’m writing this tutorial to get regular old everyday people (with an IQ less than Ross) set up with PGP. This is very useful if you don’t want people other than your intended recipient to be able to read your messages.
Go ahead and skip this section if you know about PGP and email.
Email is not, by nature, a secure form of communication. Anybody who happens to be listening “on the wire” can read your email. And unless you run your local server as an email server, your hosting provider can also read your email. This includes the infamous Lavabit service. Continue reading Be Secure: A Beginners’ Guide to PGP with Gmail using MailVelope
UPDATE: Use nginx for memory efficiency.
I’ve just mercilessly murdered a Dreamhost “VPS” for good and I’m a happy man. In this article I will elaborate on why they’re terrible and at best, a fair pile of literary deception.
Unfortunately for most, the term VPS (Virtual Private Server) is somewhat ambiguous. This allows many companies to take liberty in their interpretation of the phrase and liberty in how much they actually give you. There are several classes of VPS, of which I’ll list a spectrum from complete virtualization down to a shared system: Continue reading VPS Comparison: Run away from Dreamhost and to Linode
I showed up at my university to discover, to my dismay, that the building I’m in this year doesn’t have a university LAN connection yet and the unionized university employees had left for the long weekend.
Thankfully, I have a T-Mobile sim with 5 Gigabytes of 4G data! But wait, after a few hours of use I was redirected:
So naturally, I said WTF and proceeded to my friendly neighborhood forum and confirmed that T-Mobile filters on User Agent Strings. Continue reading Bypassing T-Mobile User Agent Tether Filtering