Category: Skills
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The Weekly Feast – Paprikás Krumpli
My father taught me this recipe just before I moved out of the house, and he learned it from his mother, my Nagymama (Hungarian for grandmother). It’s one of those stick to your ribs recipes, and can be made with a variety of ingredients. This is the base recipe, and I’ve included some additions at…
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What time is it?
I have hundreds of dollars worth of GPS equipment. Not counting the cell phones we all carry with us. I wanted to try to create a Stratum 0 NTP clock. The last time I attempted this, I used a Garmin handheld GPS. Time to sync was in minutes and while the power draw as trivial,…
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The Guessing Game. Guessing Passwords
My wife read my article on passwords and “got it”. Which is nice. I was attempting to explain how password crackers use rule sets to modify input dictionaries to create more guesses from a single word list. I decided to see how much things have advanced. To say I was shocked would be an understatement.…
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Prepping – Security
Security is a concept that Chris talks about a lot in his computer babble. I want to talk about a different kind of security, though. Prepping security is a multi-layered woven mess of gods-only-know-what. Still, it’s vitally important to untangle the knots and figure out what you’ll do should shit go south. The first aspect…
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Two Factor Authentication
What we are talking about is “authentication.” Authentication is the method of confirming that you are who you say you are. There are three methods to determine authentication: Something only you know Something only you have Something unique about you In the old days, when people carried checkbooks with them and wrote checks for things,…
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Password Security/Password Managers
Password Security There are four ways of cracking a password. Guess the password Brute Force the password Go around the password authentication Trick the password from the owner If your password is easy to guess, then it is a weak password. Examples of weak passwords are: password, 1234, YOUR_NAME, BIRTHDAYS. Many things use a four…
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The Weekly Feast – Everything Bagel Casserole
I love my bagels. I love everything about them. You could use homemade bagels for this, but if you want to buy them, that makes it SO EASY. This is very much a throw-together meal that could be made the evening before then just heated up in the morning if you’re feeding a crowd. And…
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Single Point of Failure?
Resiliency is a goal. I’m not sure if we ever actually reach it. In my configuration, I’ve decided that the loss of a single node should be tolerated. This means that any hardware failure that takes a node of line is considered to be within the redundancy tolerance of the data center. This means that…
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What Did I Buy?
In upgrading from copper to fiber, I’ve been exploring the different options and learning as I go. Some learning curves have been steep, others have been “relearning” what I already knew. One of the biggest things I needed to learn is that there are “switches” that are actually “routers”. That was mind-bending. The other is…
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Prepping – Turn off the Lights
This is the prime time to test your preparations. Christmas is over, but people are not settled. It’s not “usual” scheduling because kids are off school, and you may be off work. So… Go turn off your power at the main breaker. Why? The answer is that preparation only works if you’re actually… prepared. You…