Infinity Blade

Yesterday, Infinity Blade was released for supported iOS devices. Having been a gamer most of my life, I have to marvel at the technical achievement(s) involved. Read More...

Chilling Effects

My employer had a mandatory shutdown the week of Thanksgiving; to get paid, we could burn vacation time. It was an interesting week... Read More...

And so it goes...

The past month has been an encouraging one: Things are settling down at work, and nothing major has gone wrong in my life otherwise. Read More...

Openswan vs strongSwan

From the beginning of my VPN project, I knew about strongSwan... but I stuck to Openswan because that’s what is covered in the Openswan book I bought and read.

After perusing the strongSwan website for a few minutes, one thing became apparent: strongSwan is documented much better. After some research, I’ve switched from openSwan to strongSwan. Read More...

Success in the land of the VPN

I can finally report success with my recent obsession with getting a functional VPN for my home network. Actually, I can report two... Read More...

More VPN

I haven’t made any progress with an IPsec L2TP VPN - mainly because I’ve discovered that my ‘secondary’ internet connection (ie. the office) blocks IPsec. This makes it hard to test and verify anything. I’ll give it a go Tomorrow when I go and see my brother. Read More...

VPN Madness

The past few days (Labor Day Weekend), I’ve been learning about VPN’s - specifically, about IPsec VPNs using Openswan. A couple of years back, I bought a book by the Openswan developers about how to install, configure, setup, and use modern VPNs. Read More...

ntop

I’ve been playing with ntop, a rather neat way to monitor network traffic. I’ve got it connected to my personal machine at home, and it’s able to monitor all network traffic (of any kind - TCP/IP, raw ethernet, whatever). It’s slick and powerful. Read More...

What a Summer

It’s been quite a summer. I haven’t been able to blog anything because my wife broke her foot walking down the stairs. After that, she was supposed to stay off her feet (obviously). This meant that I had to handle all the housework. I also had to do the yardwork. Read More...

Google's New Toys

This week is Google I/O, and Google is releasing a slew of new technologies. I’m excited about a couple of ‘em:
  • Google Font Directory (and the Google Font API)
  • WebM: A new video codec, open-source, and a successor to Ogg Theora
Read More...

It's not a crash... it's an upgrade opportunity.

I’ve been working with my Hirobo Sceadu Evo .50 for the past several weeks, trying to get it to work “just right.” It was wasted effort, apparently. Read More...

Things seem darkest before the light.

The date I posted last was a very eventful one. I was enjoying the evening with my wife, or at least trying to, given my attitude about the R/C Club’s 2.4 GHz policy... and life got much more complicated. Read More...

Grumpy at the AMA

So, after getting all excited by the opening of the new Utah Helicopter Association flying field, I found out yesterday that the field is only chartered for pilots who use 2.4 GHz spread spectrum radios. This did not please me... Read More...

MythTV Follow-Up

After having tweaked my MythTV setup some, I can say it’s starting to actually work. I found another HDMI cable, and a joiner that let me join two fairly long HDMI cables into one cable long enough for the run. I then found I had to replace my nVIDIA GeForce 6200 with a newer card, preferably one that supported nVIDIA’s VDPAU extensions for X11 (VDPAU is a GPU/video decoder library). So with a cheap $40 GeForce GT 220, I can now play full 1080i HD video, with 5.1 surround sound. Read More...

Wendover "Fun"

Angela & I spent the weekend celebrating our 1st wedding anniversary. We decided to go to Wendover, NV, which is about two hours east of Salt Lake City. It’s also roughly adjacent to the Bonneville Salt Flats. My thoughts are that unless you want to lose money at the Casino, there’s not much to do... Read More...

Backups & Anniversaries

Well, Angela & I have now been married for one full year. We’re celebrating our anniversary first with a family reunion (not really a celebration for us, but hey, free food & company), and then we’re going to Wendover for the weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing the Bonneville Salt Flats, if nothing else. I certainly could use the relaxation.

Life has been pretty good for me; work is looking promising, with a feeling that we’re making a difference.

I’ve had a couple of my R/C Helicopters out already (just back yard hovering for the moment); I still have to service my Rappy & get it ready to fly. That machine hasn’t flown in years now...

And I’ve discovered a really awesome tool for system backups: CrashPlan. (Click for details on CrashPlan) Read More...

MythTV

A short tale of my experience with MythTV - probably the most popular Linux DVR software package. Read More...

Apple Mail: Triumph and Tragedy

I generally only discover new things when something isn’t working for me... and I couldn’t use Apple’s Mail.app to access my Gmail account. (And suddenly, at that -- it worked a few days ago...) Read More...

The Big Enema

Well, I finally caved: After about three years with the same installation, I nuked my hard drive and re-installed from scratch. Read More...

Holy crap, Google!

Google crawls some places at the speed of light, apparently... Read More...

Moving isn't fun.

Moving isn’t fun... Angela & I have just moved from our lovely apartment to our Aunt & Uncle’s home. We’re going to be house-sitting for them for the next two years. Read More...