hardware, software, and life
The XPS Work Light can be added to the DeWalt DWS779 Miter Saw to add functionality normally found on the DWS780. Various tutorials are on the internet show how to do the upgrade for around $70 by installing the light, a power supply, and replacing part of the handle. This post reviews how to do the same modification for around $30 using the XPS Work Light and a battery pack.
Today, Google announced that it is killing the free control plane for GKE clusters, except for one free zonal cluster per billing account. Let’s look at the timeline of events (source: release notes archive ): June 2015 (k8s 0.19.3) - Kubernetes master VMs are no longer created for new clusters. They are now run as a hosted service. There is no Compute Engine instance charge for the hosted…
The development world is quickly making the shift to Docker and microservices, and every day I feel like I’m running more Docker containers. My daily laptop is an Macbook Pro (Early 2015), but I’ve recently had the chance to test the Dell XPS 15 (9550) as well. In doing so, I got to wondering what the performance penalty for running containers through a Virtual Machine (such as…
PHP 7.0.0 was just tagged yesterday , and I was interested to see if it could live up to the performance claims that Zend made . Yii2 is my PHP framework of choice, so I built PHP 7.0.0 from source, stress tested one of my application’s pages, and compared performance to PHP 5.6.4. Benchmark Results The maximum acceptable levels here for web performance are PHP 5.6.4 serving between 75-100…
Recently I was programming in the Yii Framework and ran into a situation where I wanted to use INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE in an Active Record. In my research, I discovered that this is specific to MySQL. In my case, this was still be a valuable requirement for my Web Application and was worth extending Yii to get working. My approach was as follows:
In the past few years, an interesting new option has arisen in the Music Industry – the option to purchase music “As A Service” is now extremely popular through services such as Spotify, Google Play Music, etc. I instantly fell in love with Google Play Music All Access and needed a way to play it in my car through my HTC One (M7) Android cell phone. I decided to upgrade my car stereo to the Alpine…
In my quest to bring my vehicle’s audio system up to 2013 standards, I started out with a search at crutchfield.com with the criteria of Bluetooth Playback and no CD Player. My specific use-case is playing Google Play Music All Access over Bluetooth through my HTC One (M7) to the Car Stereo. The search returned a few “Digital Media Receivers” (DMRs) and the first unit that I ordered was the JVC…
I have had my Late 2008 Aluminum Unibody MacBook for over 3.5 years now. I had not used my optical drive in quite some time, and went to watch a DVD today. The optical drive made a loud buzzing sound and seemed to vibrate more than usual. I opened the MacBook up and discovered that downward pressure on the optical drive made the problem worse, while wedging a screwdriver under the optical drive…