You ever go to a friend’s house, need to send a photo to someone, and realize it’d be way faster if you were on their wifi network? Then you ask and the host goes yeah, join my (punny-named) network, and then you ask for the password and it’s like 25 random alphanumeric characters someone has …
Yearly Archives: 2019
Puddle & Pile—the app that predicts when your puppy needs to go—is freaking amazing
Last month, my family got a dog. It was our first ever dog after a lifetime of cat ownership. In the preceding months I asked everyone I know for advice on how to raise my someday dog. At a conference dinner this past summer, my favorite food writer on earth, Helen Rosner mentioned one piece …
Cleaning up my closet/my first networking rack
Here’s the before shot of my home DSL modem attached to a Unifi Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus and a Unifi Security Gateway, then a Unifi 16 port powered switch, a mess of cabling from my wifi points and wireless point to point network, two Raspberry Pis, and then the five internet-of-things hubs I have to …
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My first LED project
A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a couple interesting videos on YouTube, namely these two: Both videos blew my mind about what’s possible with cheap off-the-shelf stuff. Thanks to the tech boom and drive for ever cheaper LEDs for all sorts of uses, the gear for building light strips is ridiculously cheap, while the …
Extending Apple’s homekit through Homebridge
I’ve been doing a lot of weekend house projects lately. I started with hours on YouTube watching videos on how to wire up wall switches because I wanted to control more lights on my network. I followed the Wirecutter’s roundup of the best IoT wall switches and jumped on their cheap pick, the Kasa HS200 …
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My first hour with Airpods Pro
Off the bat you should know that I have tried in-ear canal headphones a few times over the last couple decades and they’ve never been comfortable or offered such great sound quality that the uncomfortableness was worth it. Instead, headphones that go into and down your ears have always felt like medical equipment to me, …
Don’t restore from backup (for a bit of a detox)
I’m two weeks into owning my iPhone 11 Pro and I have to say two things have jumped out since I’ve started using it. The first is that I didn’t think I’d use the wide angle lens much, but in the past couple weeks, being able to walk around with a phone that shoots similar …
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How to use Instagram on your mac desktop
1. Open Safari, login to Instagram 2. Go to Safari Preferences, under the advanced tab, then enable the Show Develop menu in menu bar 3. Go back to Instagram, click that new Develop menu and go to User Agent and select Safari – iOS 4. Upload images from your desktop computer for the first time …
Crater Lake rim ride
Crater Lake in southern Oregon is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s the textbook example of a lake formed in the caldera of a former volcano and even though I studied this region extensively in college, I didn’t get to actually visit it until a few years ago. A couple weekends a …
More on remote work
If you caught my earlier post about working remotely, I would highly recommend checking out Scott Hanselman’s own post about remote work tips which has loads more good advice. He does a great job breaking down a good/better/best approach for video meeting hardware, with the relative costs of each option. My advice on webcams was …
A Whole Lotta Nothing 