random neuron misfires

I stumbled upon this recently and wanted to add it to the list of other HOWTOs I have on using rsync to back up your device or machine. I’m a BIG fan of rsync, and use it all the time for backing up Linux, BSD, Windows machines, tablets and pretty much everything. Now, it’s drop-dead […]

Recently, one of my Android devices stopped reading the memory card. Opening the device, the microSD card was so hot I couldn’t hold it in my hand. The battery on that corner of the device had started to swell slightly. I’ve used this device every day for 3+ years without any issues. Until this week. […]

Thanks Slashdot for carrying your users over to my blog this morning! The rsync team has been doing this for quite awhile, and I had an idea. Why not share this more broadly? So I created a quick little script to generate my own “warrant canary”. Instructions follow below. Note: Based on the direct emails […]

The recent and critical Java CVE necessitates that everyone either uninstall, remove or update Java immediately. My employer uses a lot of Java, and removing or uninstalling it across thousands of machines just isn’t possible. We also support 4 platforms for each new release (in 32-bit and 64-bit), so pushing out a new version of […]

My daughter recently dropped my computer flat on the floor from a standing height (she’s only 5), catastrophically crashing both hard drives in the laptop. I limped along for a few days because I had to function with it for work, and only just today, decided to rip it apart, back up the data that […]

Let me just start by saying that I have a lot of data. In multiple places. Some on laptops, some on servers, some on removable drives and mirrored hard disks sitting in a bank vault (yes, really). Lots of data on lots of systems in different states and locations: client data, personal data, work data, […]

I use encryption. A lot. I don’t really have a convenient way to use encryption for the backups I use when I store them offsite at “The Vault“, and my backups have become too large now to fit conveniently on a single or double DVD. Here’s what I was previously doing: mkisofs -v -o ${DATE}_backup.iso […]

I’m a heavy user of IRC and have been since the late 90’s. I use X-Chat for IRC on almost all machines, including Mac and Windows, not just the Linux environment that it was created upon. When I recently upgraded my OS X Lion (10.7.5) machine to OS X Mavericks (10.9), I started seeing a […]

Everyone is feeling the crunch of the financial market teardown, from jobs lost to increased expenses to losing your house and home to bankruptcy. This is just the beginning, unfortunately. As more and more jobs are lost, as more and more markets dry up, it will cascade and probably accelerate through various different markets. We […]

I’ve been configuring one of my machines as a FreeBSD 6.1 server in my spare picoseconds, to serve as a fileserver, rsync server, public mirror, backup server, transparent squid proxy, coffee maker and whatever else I can make it do. In order to do this, I needed to add a bunch of packages and tweak […]