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Broadcom / Netgear’s 802.11ac Event (Gigabit Wifi)

Posted by on 17 May 2012, 1:00 pm

Earlier this week Broadcom and Netgear had a joint release event for their new 802.11ac “Gigabit” WiFi equipment. Broadcom is providing the chipsets while Netgear is providing the “finished product” which included the R6300 router, R6200 router, and the A6200 USB WiFi adapter (dongle). So far these three items are the only 802.11ac products available, but the presenters mentioned that they expected to see a shift from 802.11n to .11ac over the next 6-9 months with a lot of equipment available by the end of 2013. I suspect they also know of additional products in the pipeline that we haven’t heard of yet.

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Diablo 3 Release Day!

Posted by on 15 May 2012, 1:00 pm

Diablo 3 was released today, or more accurately at midnight. The servers promptly crashed (which these days seems to be a badge of success), but were brought back online fairly quickly.

If you don’t yet have Diablo 3, you can still order it through Amazon, or (assuming you have a decent internet connection) just go straight through Blizzard and download it. I chose the former (according to Amazon I pre-ordered back in 2010), and am now a bit upset as my copy isn’t showing up until Wednesday, despite the fact that I should have Prime Release Day Shipping.

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Taking Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin for a spin

Posted by on 10 May 2012, 1:00 pm

It’s been about 2 weeks since Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) has been released and I figured it was about time to take it for a spin. I reformatted my Dell Latitude E4200 (which was running Linux Mint 12 KDE) and installed the 64 bit desktop edition. I thought I was done with this entire Unity/Gnome 3 debacle and off to KDE forever, turns out that might have been premature.

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Disaster Prep: Have you checked your supplies recently?

Posted by on 8 May 2012, 1:00 pm

This post is part of a series on disaster preparedness. Each entry will cover one part of the preparations I’m making a “disaster kit”, along with why I’m including the items, how important they are, and how much they cost. See the initial posting for more details.

Roughly two years ago I posted a series of entries about preparing for a disaster (natural, man-made, or otherwise). Those posts covered a number of topics and while not all inclusive, did cover a number of the major items that are important to have in case of emergency. There is one critical point in any disaster preparedness plan that I haven’t discussed previously, and that is vigilance. It’s been two years since I first put together my emergency boxes, have needs changed? Have supplies gone bad?

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Review: SOG TK-02 Toothlock Folder

Posted by on 3 May 2012, 1:00 pm

My everyday carry knife for the last many years has been the Benchmade 630, which I absolutely love. Unfortunately, sometimes I’m a space cadet and forget where I put the knife and thus have no knife for the day. About a year ago I saw the SOG Specialty Knives and Tools TK-02 Toothlock Folder (1/2 Serrated) show up on Woot.com for a very low price. I thought it was worth giving a shot to potentially add it to my EDC (Editor’s note: EveryDay Carry) collection. I haven’t been disappointed.

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Using Cloudflare to keep sites fast & secure

Posted by on 1 May 2012, 1:00 pm

Cloudflare is a CDN, site optimizer, and security product all rolled into one. The main feature that is of use to me (and most people, I presume) is the CDN portion which some have called a “poor man’s Akamai“. Cloudflare sits in front of your website and acts like a caching layer spread out across 14 global edge nodes. This means your site should be “fast” everywhere in the world, rather than just within 3,000 miles of your server. I’ve been using it for a few sites over the last couple of years and so far I’ve had good experiences with the service. It being free (with a premium option) has definitely helped.

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Book Review: Ready Player One

Posted by on 26 April 2012, 1:00 pm

This last weekend I bought and finished (in a 24 hour time-frame) a great new booked titled Ready Player One. I found it while surfing Amazon after finishing the Ender’s Game series and I’m really glad that I did. I won’t spoil the book for you (for that there is Wikipedia), but if you’re a geek, nerd, or grew up around the 80s – you’ll probably enjoy it too.

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Initial publishing of Puppet scripts

Posted by on 24 April 2012, 1:00 pm

Once you get to a certain number of servers (virtual, physical, or cloud), you need some manner of centrally managing the machines. Something that will let you install packages and configure them all in some standard way, so you don’t have repeat these steps a hundred times yourself. In my experience, the pay off was less during the initial setup phase (because you’re generally only setting up 1 or 2 machines at a time) and more in the “we need to change something that affects all the machine” phase. Regardless of what phase, Puppet does a great job of helping you out. The last company I worked for did not have much in the way of central management so I started to learn Puppet and deployed it.

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How to successfully launch a mobile app – for newbies

Posted by on 19 April 2012, 1:00 pm

The other day a family member emailed me and essentially asked me “How do you make a mobile app?”. I could have written back “Write code, publish it”, but that would have been the smart ass remark. It’s not that I don’t love to be a smart ass, but I presumed they wanted a real answer and I refined the question a bit. It’s not “How do you make a mobile app?”, but “How do you successfully launch a mobile app?”. Other than writing some code, there are a few more steps to successfully launch an app. The app might not be wildly popular (If you want to know how to make a wildly successful mobile app, please go talk to Rovio), but it will have a solid foundation on which you can build. I’m not even sure if my family member wanted to make money from this mobile app, but if I were to sit down and write a serious app – these are the steps I would follow.

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Setting up a new GitHub repo in TortoiseGit

Posted by on 17 April 2012, 1:00 pm

By now you’ve come around to accept that Git Is The Answer. You are a smart cookie and you’ve realized that GitHub Is The Answer (to Git). So you start creating GitHub repos for anything and everything (like me). It’s easy to create a new Git repo under Linux because GitHub tells you how. It’s also super easy to do so on Mac because you’ve got the GitHub client for OSX. But what if you’re on Windows? What if you’re on Windows and you use TortoiseGit? It’s easy, and I’ve got instructions!

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