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Creating a RAID drive on MacOS
This is not the most obvious thing with any operating system, but it’s particularly confusing on the Mac. If you have some data that is really sensitive, then you want to create a RAID1 also known as a mirror set. This means that if you have two 16TB drives for instance, the system writes the…
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DigitalOcean WordPress Database Connection Cannot Be Reestablished
This happened again on one of my servers. The last time, it had to do with the lack of a swap file and then running out of physical memory. Usually a reboot helps which you do like this: Rebooting a Digital Ocean image by ssh into the machine and then sudo service apache2 restart and…
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COVID-19 Things to Watch and Ways to Buy
OK, been spending lots of time at home. Here are some fun things to do: The COVID-19 One World: Together at Home. What an uplifting concert. Made me smile and cry at the same time. Maluma, Kacey Musgrave, Keith Urban, they were all so awesome! The 7PM New Yorker Cheer. Wow. And if you are…
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Zoom Security Part Trois
Ok, so here’s the final things about making Zoom work: 2FA. Make sure you have two factor authentication on, but this is actually pretty complicated because it’s really at its heart an enterprise product. So there are three separate steps, first even though you probably have a personal account, there is the concept of an…
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Argh Airplay 2 is still broken for streaming audio and video
Well, for a long time I’ve been using Rogue Amoeba (a great name!) Airfoil. This plugs itself into the Mac sound system and lets you stream content to just about everything. From Chromecast, to anything else. Apple introduce Airplay 2 which does the same thing. This works at the application level. That is if you…
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Customizing Astra Sierra Industry Template
If you have finished importing this, then time to do the conversion to your site, here are the details: Change the logo, this is a little trickier than you think. The easiest thing to do is to use Noun Project to get a nice graphic and then add your company name to it. You can…
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Using Vuescan with the Minolta DiIMAGE Scan Elite 5400
It’s hard to believe a 10 year old peripheral still works, but Vuescan is still functioning and I’m scanning 35mm slides again after a long hiatus. Just a few things to remember: When you create file names, you should try to remember the date of photo and where it is. That is way more useful…
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Tesla Dashcam Storage and Viewer
Tesla 2020.12.5 has a cool feature. You can now view the Sentry Mode videos inside your car. That’s pretty awesome, but using an old USB Flash drive, you really do see how slow it is to bring things up. When it was just batch, that wasn’t a big deal since you have to yank the…
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Free books for COVID-19 quarantine
Do getting tired of watching TV. Well as we wait it out there are some good resources: You local libraries. No they are not closed. Get a virtual card and use Libby to read and listen to audiobooks. Apple Books has free classics and even audiobooks in their library. Some great kid ones too. Amazon…
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Tips on using Google Sheets for an old Excel and 1-2-3 deal
Google Sheets is wonderful for cooperative spreadsheet development, but really using it there a number of formulas tips and tricks: Blank cells. If you want to detect if a cell has a number, then BLANK() and then if you want to see if a cell is non-blank, then NOT(BLANK()) Indexing in a range. If you…
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IPad Pro 2020 and Magic Keyboard for iPad
Well, in a break from COVID-19 news, I’m using an iPad Pro 2018 with Folio Cover and I must say it works pretty well. You can’t quite use it as a Mac replacement mainly because the applications aren’t quite there. Some of the things that don’t work are writing software on it as there are…
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Using Asana (and Trello) with Chrome and Scrum to manage life in the time of COVID-19
If you are spending a lot of you day at home, then staying organized is not easy, here are some simple tips: On your Mac, turn on Announce Time. Then set it for every half an hour. That corresponds nicely to the Story Points that you use for a Scrum. If you are using Asana,…
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Figuring out when your DNS changes have propagated
Many times, you want make a DNS change, they tell you it will take 24 hours for that to propagate, but how do you know when it really happens. You can run a ping from your machine, but there’s a better tool. What’s My DNS does a check of various DNS servers around the world.…
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Review of WordPress Themes for Business
OK, we finished the review of some themes for a personal blog with scrolling content. That is quite different than something that is meant to be a front facing page for a small business or a new product. There are lots of themes that try to do this basic layout and most are paid themes,…
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iPhone Garmin Connect Loses Sync with 520 Plus
Ok, getting the Garmin 520 Plus to work with an Iphone was a chore. But if, the iPhone deletes the Garmin Connect automatically then you lose the connection and have to start all over. I worked on this before thanks to Brad, but the procedure actually worked. To review, if the Garmin Connect fails then…
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Marketing in time of crisis
Had a great conversation with Yohai, Micah, Rebecca and Tim over a Zoom cocktail party yesterday. The conversation rolled around to how does one talk about oneself and ones company in difficult times. While it’s tempting just to stop all marketing as no one is going to buy things. And organic traffic is way down…
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Gmail not activated for Gsuite because of high load
Ok file this in the department of strange things. With so many people working from home Gsuite is just jammed. In bringing up a new Gsuite account (for yet another company), I ended up in a strange loop. I would login to gmail and it would say “This account does not have Mail activated” and…
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How to wish some well at Passover
Well, I learned how to say this last year, but in Hebrew its: chag Pesach kasher vesame’ach. Indianapolis Star, 7 April 2020 I’ve no idea how to actually pronounce this, but phonetically it’s “CHAG PEH-sach kah-SHER ve-sah-MAY-ach” Google Translate
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What can a startup or small business do to stay alive in the Covid catastrophe
Ok hat tip to Tom, Rick, Will and Keith for inspiring this post. But if you are a small business what can you do. FWIW I’ve never run a small business so I don’t know much about that, but I have worked with startups (and even been in one), but here are some great words…
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Running Secure Zoom Meetings 1, 2 and 3
Everyone is now worried about Zoom security and how to make sure that you are really running end-to-end encrypted and there is no possibility for anyone to see what you are talking about. Zoom included. First of all, Zoom is inherently secure if used well, you just make sure that you use the actual Zoom…
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Zoom video backgrounds are back!
They removed it for a while. You can access this on a Mac or PC by going to Preferences > Video > Background. But where do you get footage that looks good? Well, Pexel to the rescue. While Unsplash does photos only, Pexel also does royalty-free video, so that’s a great way to do this.…
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Zoom Security and Privacy Problems, Fixes and Response and a Lesson in PR
Well, Zoom has exploded in usage and has just been hammered in the last week culminating in bans. There have been countless stories about Zoombombing where kids and conferences have been inundated. Not to mention privacy problems and security holes. And most importantly, it’s not been if Zoom is a truly evil company bent on…
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The ultimate Covid-19 Home Office
OK, I’ve gone from spending an hour in my home working to nine Zoom calls on Friday and then working until 10PM on various projects (Covid response, helping companies survive, investment funds, etc.). So suddenly having the right home office setup has become really important. So help the economy and order some stuff, but here…
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Gaming and Gaming Builds in Covid-19 Era of 2020
Well there is so much to write about here. In this Covid crisis, gaming at home is on the rise. Most sites are reporting a 50% increase in traffic. Certainly it does seem like virtual reality might very well finally find its niche as people look for escape from their daily apartment life. So what…
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Tips for Aliases in GSuite
Ok, this is a confusing topic because there are two distinct things you could mean by this. The first is if you want rich@foo.com to actually go to rich.tong@foo.com. And the second is if you want hr@foo.com to actually go to a group of people in the company like rich@foo.com and tony@foo.com. The confusing thing…
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Docusign Billing Strangeness You need to Call them
For such a cool and modern company, you can sure run into some strange troubles. For instance, we just started a new account and tied it to a Paypal account (and even got a nice first year discount thanks to Silicon Valley Bank), but then the troubles began. The bill happened, but for some reason,…
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Monitor advice for photography
Well, I’m no expert on this, I have many expert friends: 1. If you want the very highest quality, then NEC really makes the best monitors. So there are specific monitors like the BenQ PhotoVue. Because they are much more managed in terms of colors so $1K to $5k are not crazy. 2. If you are…
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Using Asana (and Trello) for a Startup
Well if you are working in a startup, it feel like things start to get out of control, there are a bunch of decent free choices. I’ve used Trello for years and it is a good way to have Kanban cards and is a nice overview of the projects. Also it is free and sharing…
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Bootstrap Multisite WordPress on AWS Lightsail
I wrote one on how to do this with Digital Ocean Multisite WordPress, but if you are on AWS, then you have some different options for Lightsail which is the easiest option. The instructions are really confusing, but basically, you use the Lightsail instructions to get it running and to get Route53 configured and then…