Recent content on The Ramblin' Man
With Windows 11 having been out long enough, and installed on my daily driver machines long enough, that I’m happy with it’s performance, I recently decided it was time to migrate a few Unraid VMs from Windows 10 to 11 now too. However, with Windows 11 having added the requirement for TPM, it turns out this upgrade process wasn’t quite as easy as downloading and running the upgrade assistant tool!…
Earlier this year I bought my first smart video doorbell – the Amcrest AD110. This was my first foray into the smart doorbell scene, and I chose this model because it was subscription-free and could record via RTSP to my home NVR, as well as locally to it’s own SD card. I refuse to pay subscriptions for smart home devices – those types of devices have an expiration date of whenever the…
I’ve been fighting with reliable presence detection since long before my Home Assistant days. This is a problem that a lot of Smart Home type platforms deal with, especially when trying to use various mobile apps to detect a phone within a geofence. Reaction speed can be sluggish, or sometimes downright not work at all, and it seems that even setting the tracking app to be exempt from battery…
Two phones ago, I had the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. I had that phone since about the time it was released until February 2019. It was by the far the longest running phone I had ever owned, and I only ended up selling it because the battery was starting to show it’s age and I needed a phone that could handle a full, action packed day without a dependency on an outlet being nearby. Before that phone,…
I was caught off guard from the Canadian Government recently and got a real eye opener for someone who works in system administration and has to uphold information security as one of the top factors in every development decision I make. When such rookie mistakes are being made day in and day out by our government themselves, it makes me wonder just how poorly my personal information, arguably some…
I recently set out to remodel our basement level laundry and utility room on a shoestring budget. As you know, basement level mechnical/laundry rooms tend to be the most neglected room of the house. If they’re finished at all (ours luckily was, except for the walls surrounding the furnace and the ceiling), then they tend to be quick finish jobs only. Ours was just that – the old cream walls were…
If you read my recent post about Wild Apricot then you probably have a pretty good idea that it really isn’t the membership system you want in this day and age, unless you like opening your non-profit’s/charity/membership group’s wallet really wide to support the absurd costs of the system, and can deal with the constant frustration of working with such an outdated platform. Here’s a look at how I…
Wild Apricot often comes up when you google search for all-in-one membership systems, especially in the context of non-profit of charity type organizations, but did you know it’s actually not your best choice in this day and age? Wild Apricot may have been one of the earlier systems in this space, but the reality is that they haven’t been able to keep up with the demands of modern organizations,…
The reality of these two marketplaces is that the majority of their use, AliExpress especially, is a marketplace to get direct, cheap access to Chinese goods. Phone cases, electronics, gadgets, clothing, housewares items, and even knock-off goods – a lot of money can be saved if you know where to look. A lot of that stuff you see on Amazon from third party sellers? You can get it on these two…
Not every organization is financially blessed enough to buy or license CRM software. We’d all love Salesforce.com, but the fact is that an industry leading system like that just isn’t an option for everyone. There are cheaper alternatives too of course, but if you want to avoid costs entirely and look at open source solutions, then it’s worth making the right decision before investing your time in…
I recently bought a 2018 Toyota Camry SE Hybrid to replace my not-very-old Kia Forte that turned into a bucket of problems [ 1 ] [ 2 ]. It’s well known that Toyota has been slow to adopt Android Auto and Apple Car Play – features that are slowing become standard on more and more models from most big auto makers these days. Rather, Toyota is really pushing their Entune 3.0 head unit software and…
Ted and Kyle, I never take the time to actually write formal complaints about anything in life. Having started my career over a decade ago in a customer service position, I realize that most companies only ever hear the bad and never the good, so I try to not be “one of those people” and usually just bite my lip if I’m unhappy with something and move on, buy another product, etc.. That being said,…
After some recent fun with an ultra low power Rock64 NAS build, I wanted to see what a new Celeron J4105 board could hold as a possible low power home server build. I’m a week into the board now, and wanted to share my thoughts so far! My Home Server History Many, many years ago I used to run a home server – it was a power hungry beast built around an early gen quad-core desktop CPU and full ATX…
I’ve gone through many iterations of a Home NAS over the years. It started with an AMD Phenom based system running in a Norco case with about 8 hard SATA hard drives (4 primary, 4 backup via Rsync). The noise and power consumption of that system was overkill for what it was used for, so I sold it and went to a four-bay QNAP NAS a few years ago. With some hard drive capacity upgrades at the time…
Do you drive a 2010-2013 Kia Forte (or one of the other vehicles I list later on)? Does your engine tick and click? Sound like it’s failing or out of oil? Maybe you’ve even been outright told by a mechanic that you need a new engine? You aren’t alone, you don’t have a “dud”, or bad luck, but are part of a problem that Kia and Hyundai have with this engine, but are not choosing to acknowledge in…
When you start Google searching any sort of medical procedure, all you’ll find are people with bad experiences ( usually due to complications, or self inflicted by not following proper recovery recommendations). Rarely will you find a good news story, or anything to put your anxiety and stress at ease (after all, that’s probably one of the biggest reasons you’re Google searching it in the first…
I should have done my research on this one – I know better – but I rushed in. The Orange Pi PC board attracted me with it’s cheap price tag and promised H.265/HEVC video support. I was going to build a Kodi player to replace my Raspberry Pi 3 to attach to our main TV and playback my large multimedia collection from my home server (mounted to Kodi via NFS share). I was starting to have a growing…
With a growing number of “Smart Home”, security, and other connected devices at home, I wanted to take advantage of the Email functionality most of these offered. For some, it was a simple as update or error notifications being sent via email, and for others it was things like security camera motion snapshots or warnings, job completion notices, and things like that. Most of these devices offered…
Inflated and biased reviews are bought and sold by the thousands every day in exchange for rank manipulation, bad reviews are guilted or bribed until they’re made good, Amazon’s attempt at “making things better” only made things worse, and why you shouldn’t always trust what you read! For about a decade or so, I ran a large online consumer electronics review blog. At my peak I was pulling in about…