Grumpy Old Techie

Lovely Scops Owl in Tsendze Rustic Camp in Kruger Park. Tsendze is one of my favourite camps in the park. It is is camping only with no electricity (solar for the lights in the bathrooms) and gas for hot water. If you want to get away from everything Tsendze is the place to go.

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Is Tesla’s Powerwall really that great?

For about a month ads appeared in my Facebook timeline trying to sell alternative energy solutions. They pushed the Tesla powerwall as a good solution because it is “pretty”. For a technical person “pretty” is very low on the list of reasons why you will buy something that will be bolted onto your garage wall.

Tesla uses lithium-ion technology in their batteries. Most solar or wind…

And the latest version of WordPress is supposed to be secure, isn’t it? Well this weekend the conventional wisdom was proven wrong.

I am a reseller for a very large domain registration and hosting company for a few years now. I primarily used it to get discounts for myself and my customers on web hosting and domain registration. I didn’t make any real profit on it but also didn’t lose money.

A…

You Cannot Fool Nature

Today 28 January 2016 is the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. This event shocked the world and shook NASA out of it’s complacency. A commission was formed to investigate. Surprisingly there was only one scientist on the commission, Richard Feynman.

He filed a minority report which was nearly suppressed and also performed his famous experiment to show the failure of the O-rings used in…

Be very careful what you click

No, this not about clicking on silly click bait articles.

Against everything I know, I decided to quickly make a few changes and clean up the file stores on a vmware cluster. I was thinking maybe an hour or so tops and I can enjoy the rest of my Saturday.

Using vmotion I moved a few virtual machines around to try balance everything nicely on the storage. Vmotion often leaves old directories…

An ambitious new project is hoping to help clean the world’s oceans with a trash collector that is reportedly the longest floating structure in recorded world history.

Back in 2013 TrueActivist reported that a 19-year-old developed a plan to clean up the world’s oceans in just 5 years, removing 7,250,000 tons of plastic. However, last week, Boyan Slat (now 21), founder and CEO of The Ocean…