Category: Software
Weather Station Excitement
August 24th, 2011, 4 Comments
I’ve sort of wanted a weather station for a long time. Lately, the ham radio hobby has intensified that, and I finally got one. When I finally got the serial link cable yesterday, well I was perhaps irrationally excited. Terah accused me of running all around the house while gathering up stuff for it. That [...]
A 4-year-old, Linux command line, and microphone
July 30th, 2011, 4 Comments
There are certain times when I’m really glad that we have Linux on the house for our boys to play with. I’ve already written how our 4-year-old Jacob has fun with bash and can chain together commands to draw ASCII animated steam locomotives. Today I thought it might be fun to install cw, a program [...]
Geeks, Hobbies, and Free/Open Source: Feedback Wanted
July 5th, 2011, 8 Comments
I’ve been thinking lately about ways to improve ways in which I interact with Free Software projects, and ways in which they interact with me. Before I proceed to take steps or make suggestions, I’d like to see if others share my traits and observations. Here are some questions I have been thinking of. If [...]
A Proud Dad
March 16th, 2011, 10 Comments
I saw this on my computer screen the other day, and I’ve got to say it really warmed my heart. I’ll explain below if it doesn’t provoke that reaction for you. So here’s why that made me happy. Well for one, it was the first time Jacob had left stuff on my computer that I [...]
Unix Password and Authority Management
January 31st, 2011, 6 Comments
One of the things that everyone seems to do different is managing passwords. We haven’t looked at that in quite some time, despite growth both of the company and the IT department. As I look to us moving some things to the cloud, and shifting offsite backups from carrying tapes to a bank to backups [...]
rdiff-backup, ZFS, and rsync scripts
January 25th, 2011, 17 Comments
rdiff-backup vs. ZFS As I’ve been writing about backups, I’ve gone ahead and run some tests with rdiff-backup. I have been using rdiff-backup personally for many years now — probably since 2002, when I packaged it up for Debian. It’s a nice, stable system, but I always like to look at other options for things [...]
Research on deduplicating disk-based and cloud backups
January 20th, 2011, 18 Comments
Yesterday, I wrote about backing up to the cloud. I specifically was looking at cloud backup services. I’ve been looking into various options there, but also various options for disk-based backups. I’d like to have both onsite and offsite backups, so both types of backup are needed. Also, it is useful to think about how [...]
Wikis, Amateur Radio, and Debian
January 3rd, 2011, 10 Comments
As I have been getting involved with amateur radio this year, I’ve been taking notes on what I’m learning about certain things: tips from people on rigging up a bicycle antenna to achieve a 40-mile range, setting up packet radio in Linux, etc. I have long run a personal, private wiki where I put such [...]
Jacob: 4 Years Old, and Troubleshooting PCs
December 12th, 2010, 2 Comments
Back in April, I wrote about Jacob and I building his first computer together and how it’s running just the Linux command-line interface — no graphics at all. And he loves it. Well, as is often the case with him, his interest in various things waxes and wanes over time. He hadn’t spent much time [...]
Debconf10
August 16th, 2010, No Comments
Debconf10 ended a week ago, and I’m only now finding some time to write about it. Funny how it works that way sometimes. Anyhow, the summary of Debconf has to be: this is one amazing conference. Despite being involved with Debian for years, this was my first Debconf. I often go to one conference a [...]
