Daniel P. Gross is a computer software and hardware professional based in Toronto.
Journaling (writing in a private diary) has become a frequent and useful habit of mine. Over time, I’ve been experimenting with ways to bring the newest tools from my professional work into that practice, and I eventually landed on the workflow below. It’s made journaling significantly more valuable for me — read on for why. Before the workflow details, it’s worth asking: why journal at all? Why…
The last post shared a technique for making a Linux machine automatically sleep and then wake up on demand. At the time, I felt I’d found something useful for my own purposes, but wasn’t sure if it would arouse any interest beyond my own. After I posted it to Hacker News , the post ended up garnering attention and discussion, seeming to show that this is a common problem looking for a simple…
It began with what seemed like a final mundane touch to my home server setup for hosting Time Machine backups : I wanted it to automatically sleep when idle and wake up again when needed. You know, sleep on idle — hasn’t Windows had that built in since like Windows 98? How hard could it be to configure on a modern Ubuntu install? To be fair, I wanted more than just sleep on idle, I also wanted…
ℹ️ This is a “scratchpad post”: a quick and rough dump of notes to aid internet travelers like yourself (and future me) For a while I used an external USB hard drive to store Time Machine backups from my MacBook. I wanted something more convenient, so I decided to set up a server on my home network to host backups, mainly for Time Machine on Macs. I used a PC running Ubuntu 22.04 with an SSD for…
In my last post , I talked about my new home internet router, which is a Raspberry Pi running OpenWRT. In this post, we’ll look at how OpenWRT’s features can be used to improve security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices on a home network. Why? Home routers block inbound traffic (from the internet to LAN devices) by default — isn’t that enough to protect IoT devices on a home network? Sort of —…
It all started when my home wireless network connection started acting up. I decided it was time to upgrade my 2013-vintage Netgear R7000 to something newer. In the last 9 years, there must have been some awesome improvements in wireless router technology anyway, right? Wrong. I tried a few new Wifi 6 routers. I was totally surprised to see that the newer routers actually performed on-par with or…
Digital vaccination certificates (sometimes called “vaccine passports”) have been in use since the summer of 2021 and are meant to communicate an individual’s COVID-19 vaccination status in a standardized way. Vaccine certificate policy is a contentious topic, one that we won’t get into here. My opinion, in short, is that vaccine certificates raise serious ethical concerns, and I hope to see an…
I recently finished reading Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning , which I really enjoyed. It inspired me to do some more research and share the story below about Xerox’s foray into office computing in the 1970s and ’80s. If you like this post, I strongly recommend reading the book! Why bother? So much has changed since the primitive computers of just a few decades ago. Why bother talking about…
Hello out there! It’s been pretty quiet around here for a while now. Life got very busy and I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to post new content. In addition to a bunch of developments in my personal life, I made a career change earlier this year. Following a long search with a few dead ends, I was very fortunate to find a good fit with the Shop team at Shopify . This entailed many changes…
This is the third post in a series about building a simple wireless temperature and humidity sensor using inexpensive components, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for communication, and Apple HomeKit to read sensor values. For the previous post, see Part 2 . In the previous post, we covered the hardware selection , hardware assembly , and software architecture . In this post, we’ll cover the last,…