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General Electric’s Water Problem

www.reddit.com/r/TechNewsToday/comments/hcols7/welcome_to_drm_water_ges_incredibly_dumb_money/

I caught this gem early this morning. General Electric Refrigerators apparently will stop dispensing water unless you replace the filter with an OEM part. Folks are obviously upset, so this one fellow bypassed the lock with a Dremel. Bravo!

More to the point however, this anti-consumer feature should…

February 24th and 25th, 2018 – Jow Visit Estrella Drive These are the game notes for Estrella Drive story for TIME STORIES board game that we played on February 24th and 25th, 2018. 1982 – Rich Mansion on Estrella Drive Goal -> Temporal Loop Location -> Hills of Hollywood When -> Gradually August 9th, 1982. Supernatural Phenomenon, house reported as haunted. A mention of canisters of sweet water…

Extracting Cisco Unity 10.5 Voicemails

In my work, I wear many hats. Amongst these is VOIP Manager. It’s not really a job, or a position really but fits neatly under the heading of IT Manager, which is my position title. I oversee the companies Cisco CallManager and Unity systems. Occaisonally when coworkers of mine leave employment, they sometimes leave behind voicemails in their Unity mailbox. I’ve been searching for a long while to…

Percentile Taxation and Citizenship

The media is awash in talk about socialized healthcare, taxation, and immigration. I do not claim to be an expert in any of this, and probably something like this would not work out, but on a lark, I started to cast about in a kind of brainstorming session about how I might solve the taxation problem and the issues surrounding citizenship. The opening gambit is socialized healthcare, also known…

Social Media Tent Flapping

I seem to vacillate between social media platforms these days. Since the collapse of my beloved Imzy, I’ve been kind of lurking about Facebook for a while. Facebook is rather unpleasant to use, mostly because the commentary is so awful. The only people to really blame are folk, the people who are on the platform aren’t really interested in communication, just trolling. So I’ve been looking back…

Just as I had migrated from Day One to Evernote, I got really tired of Evernote and it’s bloated sluggishness. So I moved my Journal again to an app platform linked to the Bear app on iOS. This application is really quite useful and a joy to use on my Macbook. I tried to sync my journal to my iOS devices, but I had less luck with that. I am however getting pretty top-notch support from the people…

Giving Chrome Some Pep

I’ve been using Google Chrome on my Macbook Pro for a long while, and I’ve noticed that some websites take some time to get moving along. In some ways, it feels like the browser is panting and trying to catch its breath. So today, while trying to solve a work problem I accidentally stumbled over a neat way to give my Chrome browser a little bit of a boost in performance. It seems to benefit when…

Moment of Geek: Raspberry Pi as Thermal Canary

A few days ago I had run into a problem at work. The small Mitsubishi Air Conditioner had decided to take a cooling nap in the middle of the day. So my office, which is also the machine room at work was up around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. I was used to this sort of thing, summers bringing primary cooling systems to their knees, but this time I had a huge A/C unit in the ceiling that I elected not to…

Walking Down Memory Lane

Some notable events from other July 1st’s 2003 – Installed a network aware fax machine, and then attached it to Groupwise. My god, Groupwise. This is such a walk down memory lane! And this of course was the first of a repeated meme that online shared mailboxes at work are upsetting to people because they aren’t “private”, in the same way that a regular fax machine is “private” by hovering over it…

One of the biggest headaches with my WordPress blog is remembering to write new posts with any frequency. It sometimes comes down to a test of many editors, which one do I like, and how smooth is the learning curve to upload my story to my blog post? Email is a pain, mostly because the instrumentation to add all the extra bits is rather annoying and I don’t really want to revisit and markup a…

DayOne 2.0 to Evernote Migration

Years ago I started to write a personal journal. Mostly the application I used was Microsoft Word, sometimes other text editors, and I’ve always been on the search for a better way to conduct my journaling habit. When I started using Apple’s Mac, I discovered Bloom Built’s DayOne journaling software. DayOne came highly recommended on many pro-Mac websites, so I bought in. Everything was going…

This new year I resolved to be done with Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I had abandoned Twitter a long time ago, Reddit was easy as I was never really invested in that platform anyways, and then most recently leaving Facebook behind. It needs a little characterization. I haven’t deleted my Facebook account, but what I have done is ceased to engage on that platform. I still do check in once a week…

Sometimes it’s the best thing to assert you win and walk away from a toxic problem. So far today I’ve done that quite a bit. What have I abandoned? I’ve walked away from Facebook. It’s been four days since I even logged into Facebook and since then I haven’t missed it. I’ve been catching up on my news; the Spiceworks Community board consumes a lot of time. Then after that, I turned my attention…

Today is a day for Google to let me down. Generally, a lot of technology companies end up in the same dustbin. They always promise some glittering awesomeness, but when you start to engage with them, you discover that the awesome is rather half-baked. In this particular case, the first two Google technologies were their Music Play property and Android. Google Music, or Google Play, whatever it’s…

Today I received a sample email that some of my coworkers caught. They asked me to look into it. The email link led to a bit.ly link, which I was able to extract and through a clever little trick, appending the bit.ly link with a + character doesn’t load the site that the bit.ly link goes to but tells you about the link. This link has been clicked on about 7000 times. Already I know we’re dealing…

What Roy Batty Saw

We hired a new coworker and learned that he needed a Cisco VOIP phone. I had one spare unit left, an older Cisco 7912 unit. I went to go plug it in, and the POE over Ethernet simply wasn’t registering on the phone. I knew for a fact that the phone itself was fine, and the switch I was plugging the phone into was functioning well. I also knew that my station cables were working fine, so I used my…

I started out looking at FreeBSD based on a draw from FreeNAS, which then led to ZFS, the primary file system that FreeNAS and FreeBSD use. At work, I am looking at the regular handling of enormous archival files and the further along I went the more I realized that I would also need storage for a long time. There are a lot of ways to ensure that archival files remain viable, error correcting…