Saying goodbye to our best friend
Goodbye my friend … Just over eleven years ago, my wife and I rescued a fuzzy black and white bundle of joy. Roxy, our border collie / lab mix became our best friend, terrorizer of woodpeckers, herder of deer and black bear, and guardian of the home – and the best damn dog I’ve ever had the […]
Australia, New Zealand & New Photo Gear
Business travel may not be glamorous, but has its perks. I returned home from this weekend from a business trip that took me to Auckland and Christchurch New Zealand as well as Sydney Australia. While I do love visiting these cities, the trip there and back is hellacious and it takes me days to recover […]
Home Automation with SmartThings and ActionTiles
Do press the shiny red (ActionTiles) button! Moving further down the road of my smart home automation insanity, I’ve started looking for a panel to control things around the home. The paradigm I was looking for is not very different from a home security alarm control panel. I wanted a wall mountable or tabletop touch […]
Home Automation Solution Mapping
Home Automation, or has my house become self-aware? SkyNet Be Damned! I’ve been playing around with Home Automation and SmartHome IoT technology for a couple of months and went searching for a way to map out all the connections, dependencies and devices in the house. I tripped across SmartHomeDB on my twitter feed and gave […]
Summer Travel: Australia and New Zealand
Fixin’ to get ready It’s looking like I’ll be doing some (work) summer travel this month, heading down to Australia and New Zealand. This is a long, whirlwind trip, a couple days in Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand; a few days in Sydney and Canberra, Australia then the long haul back home. With any luck […]
Image Optimization – ShortPixel for WordPress
ShortPixel – (Image) Size Does Matter The majority of this website is related to my photography obsession hobby. I’ve always walked a fine line on image optimization – trying to get the smallest images with the best quality and retain the EXIF/Metadata of the images. Until recently, I have been using a mix of EWWW Image Optimizer […]
Photography backup and archiving – plan for disaster
Protecting your work with a successful photography backup plan I’ve been asked how I protect my artwork, images and related information with a dedicated photography backup plan. I take a belt and suspenders approach with multiple copies on and off site using both free and subscription services. When approaching a backup solution or plan, first […]
WannaCry as a security belweather?
WannaCrypt: A test for an organization’s security posture? A week after the news about the WannaCry (WannaCrypt) ransomware attacks, the security companies FUD and the general misunderstanding of the root cause of this supposed nightmare – where are we and what exactly have we learned? Other than I am ranting more about it? Where are we? […]
WannaCry in my beer
WannaCry or the Cyber-Event that should never have happened Ok, the WannaCry tears are drying and InfoSec and IT professionals around the world are catching up on sleep lost over the weekend. A fair number of them are probably, like me, wondering how this became so ugly and so widespread. While I know this cyber event had […]
Thoughts on Alexa and SmartThings Smart Home Integration
What’s in a Name? Ok, while I may have a Smart Home, my brain is getting fuzzy so I am writing this wall of text more for my own head than anything else. If things here help you in any way, all the better… In my last post I went into some of the bits […]