In a recent blog post I explained how I secure my home network with a VPN. In that article, I also explained how I enabled…
The path less traveled.
In a recent blog post I explained how I secure my home network with a VPN. In that article, I also explained how I enabled…
In this article, I describe how I added security to my home network by installing a router that directs all internet traffic through an encrypted VPN connection. The adventure includes my experience with the FlashRouters company, the Tomato router firmware software, an OpenVPN connection to the Cloak network, the Linksys E2500 router and the Netgear Nighthawk R7000 router.
I’ve never been good at remembering my social media URLs. Am I “dafacto” there or “mhenders”? At Facebook, where neither was available, what was that…
I experienced something today that’s frustratingly becoming quite common. I emailed the support address of a financial institution I use, and they replied that they…
When you create a droplet (virtual private server) at DigitalOcean, the service sends you an email containing the login password of the root user. The…
This website runs on WordPress, and over the past several years has seen its hosting move from the DreamHost shared environment, to DreamPress managed hosting, to GoDaddy managed hosting to, finally, DigitalOcean. This article explains why.
For many years, I stored the majority of my data in Dropbox. A few months ago, however, I migrated to BitTorrent Sync (BTS), and haven’t looked back. This article explains why.
I recently switched from DreamHost’s DreamPress to GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting service. This article explains why, and discusses my experience so far. [Update: Since writing this article, I’ve switched away from GoDaddy, and now host my blog in a VPS at DigitalOcean. You can read about that switch, here.]
After a friend passed last week, I was forced to reflect on the matter of how our personal and confidential digital data would be passed on and entrusted to others in case something unexpected happened to my wife and I.
On each of the six Macintosh computers that I manage, I have a number of tools and utilities running which perform regular duties. Carbon Copy Cloner keeps attached bootable backup drives current. Arq keeps cloud backups current. ChronoSync periodically updates some specific archives, etc. etc.
Someone named Dillon Henderson recently joined the Sony Playstation Network using my Gmail address, and I immediately began receiving two to four emails per day, as Dillon recharged his account and purchased content or games, or whatever it is you purchase on the network. (I guess Dillon’s middle name must be “Matt”.)
Having received a new American Express card, I just finished updating the billing details at the *thirteen* online services which periodically charge that card. And…
I discovered this morning that the [Google Authenticator app][1] is broken in iOS 7. While it does display authentication codes, it doesn’t display the associated…
As an amateur photographer, there are three simple things you can do to dramatically improve your photos. The first two relate to the most important…
Manual app updating, prior to iOS7, was beneficial to developers as a mechanism to notify their customers that a new version was available[^fn-abuse]. Since Apple…
About a year ago, I opened a checking account at Simple.com and made a small deposit. I’d seen a lot of chatter about the new…
I can hardly express how excited I was to see this purple-toned, ugly-ass bar now appearing at the top of the otherwise-beautiful Flickr website. They…
Have you ever noticed that when surfing around the web you’ll often see big banner ads to websites you’ve recently visited? That’s due to this…
The Kenu Airframe is the best car mount I’ve found for use with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6. Here’s my review.
We have a customer in Germany for whom we developed several Facebook apps used in their business. The apps were associated with the personal Facebook…
Over the past decade, we at Makalu have tended to host everything ourselves. We leased several dedicated servers, hosted all our websites and apps, hosted and managed our own email and operated our own DNS. Recently, we’ve been looking at ways of simplifying.
Over the years, we at Makalu have tried several web-based customer support services, and have never really found one that worked for us. Until now.
This article shows you how to use a custom domain in place of those ugly, long Dropbox User Content public folder URLs.
For being one of the world’s largest and most active online services, it’s surprising how buggy the Twitter website is.
If you follow my blog via an RSS reader, you will need to update the site feed URL due to Google’s shutting down of the FeedBurner service. Continue reading for details.
