My current job that I started last summer has been a godsend in every way possible. With this has also come some fringe benefits: Computers and hardware they don’t want. Fast forward a bit and ended up scoring a nice old Sandy Bridge Xeon and upgrade my gaming desktop! Now my best friend has always …
Author Archives: Austin
Testing out new (old) camera!
Managed to snag a Canon Rebel t3 and have been tinkering a bit. So here’s some cat photos! Auto adjustments for the first photo, then a couple other odds and ends: The last is fully adjusted with shadows/lighting and a couple other tricks. It’s nice to get back into the photography stuff so hopefully there …
Smart Home: Mindset and Products
Smart Home. The new buzz words of 2017, and now 2018. You’ve all seen it. Products lining ads in webpages and flyers for Black Friday of last year touting “Google home!” and “Amazon Echo/Alexa!”. I personally have tried a number of these basic items and have fallen in love with the simplicity of a smart …
Steam Link: First impressions
Steam had a sale on their Steam Link device over Christmas and the following week. I picked one up for dirt cheap and figured even if it wasn’t that great, it wouldn’t be more than a few bucks lost. I got the unit in the mail last night and was impressed immediately with the packaging: …
Crockpot Mac and Cheese recipe
Ingredients: 4 cups (1 lb) uncooked elbow macaroni 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, cut into pieces 3 cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese 2 cups grated Pepper Jack 6 eggs, beaten 1 cup sour cream (2) 10 3/4-ounce cans condensed Cheddar cheese soup 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups whole milk 1 teaspoon black pepper Boil macaroni …
Streaming, streaming
Due to a late birthday gift, I ended up with an updated graphics card in my main desktop gaming rig; I can finally stream while playing games without massive FPS loss. Check me out! Specs on current setup: Stealth Mid size tower 500W Corsair Modular PSU AMD 8 core bulldozer (3.8GHz, stock) Hyper 212+ Cooler …
Migrations, migrations…and SSL
I’ve wanted to use SSL for a while now on my sites to better encrypt traffic and logins on the site. Unfortunately doing this nuked my previous server and had to be restored from backups. As such… Welcome to a new webserver! I went through and migrated all hosts from this system to utilize SSL …
Overly complicated ideas: IRC command of servers!
A little background: I get these ideas once in a while that eventually come to fruition after a couple months of brainstorming and tinkering. I’ve had the idea for a while of having a central way to maintain my fleet of Linux servers I host along with Windows if possible. In the past, I used …
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Most complicated home network ever…ever.
A little background: I’ve been building and tinkering with computers since I was about 12, when I got my own laptop and desktop both from garage sales and began swapping parts, doing OS upgrades from floppy disks and doing whatever I could to tinker with them. Fast forward almost two decades, and I’m still at …
Offsite backups 101
I’ve learned some hard lessons in the couple decades of tinkering with computers. One of the biggest is data loss. Like everyone else, I didn’t worry as much as I should have and it cost me…