Category: Technology
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Enter Gutenberg: Modernizing WordPress
For those who don’t know, my blog runs on WordPress – an open-source platform to create websites. It’s estimated that 43% of the Internet runs on WordPress. Every couple of years my blog needs to jump over some technical hurdle. In 2008, I chose to make the move from Serendipity over to WordPress due to…
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Rooftop solar, a heatwave, and the grid!
California has major challenges around our power grid. California’s 40 million people use massive amounts of power. The grid’s job is to ensure all of those people have a constant supply of power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Our grid extends across varying terrain. Consumers also aren’t always…
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Upgrading from Mojave to Catalina
I’ve spent this weekend doing some maintenance on my Macintosh: organizing old photos into albums, upgrading various operating system patches, and finally upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Upgrading Windows was so wonderfully easy it reminded me about my difficult experience upgrading my Mac from Mohave to Catalina. To set context, I run Windows…
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First Look: Epson EcoTank 4760
Down at my core, I have always been partial to laser printers. In high school, the family had an HP LaserJet 4. To say that thing was a tank was a massive understatement. It printed volumes of paper and never really skipped a beat. Term papers, science projects, tax returns – whatever we threw at…
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Chevrolet Volt: First impressions from 6000 miles!
I bought a new car! I wanted something with good fuel economy as I’m driving about 20,000 miles a year, and my Tacoma just wasn’t the right vehicle anymore. I landed on a 2018 Chevrolet Volt. The Volt is a range-extended electric car (not a hybrid). The first 53 miles are fully electric. The next 350…
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Debridement: Can I have too many friends?
Facebook isn’t reality. In fact, it skews it. It magnifies the top 10% and bottom 5% (I’m inferring here) of my friends’ day-to-day life. Sometimes I find myself comparing my life, to those skewed views which Facebook presents to me. I’ve also become keenly aware of the cost, to have consumed all of that data…
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Tips for using Dragon for Mac
I’m a huge fan of voice dictation. I first fell in love with Nuance NaturallySpeaking on the Windows platform. After I switched over to the Mac and purchased Dragon for Mac 4, I was sorely disappointed. The dictation quality was not near as good nor was the cursor handling. I quickly backpedaled trying to get…
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The agile customer
As many of you know, I’m a big fan of agile methodology. I’ve written much about agile software development at work. A recent air travel experience reminded me that agile isn’t just about software. People and experiences can be agile too. In particular, savvy product owners know that customers can be agile too. Allow me…
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5 Tips for a Great Coworking Experience
I had two great days up in Lake Tahoe experiencing very different coworking spaces. Before that, I’ve been to a couple of different coworking spaces where I’ve stayed over in certain cities and extra day or two. I find that in coworking spaces I’m much more productive for me than sitting in a hotel room…
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Dragon Dictate in a virtual machine
Ever since voice dictation became within reach to consumer in the late 1990s, I’ve always been intrigued with the technology. My first experience with Dragon Dictate included a massive amount of floppy disks, a bad microphone, and a very poor experience. Not being the best typer, I was relegated to keyboarding for another 10 years.…
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Moving from WordPress.org to WordPress.com
I spent a fair amount of time searching but didn’t find many articles talking about migrating from wordpress.org to wordpress.com. Here’s my story. In all the iterations of my website, I have to say I have truly fallen in love with WordPress. The platform is open, extensible, and approachable.WordPress isn’t just for blogs. WordPress truly changed…
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20 years of HTML
Time flies. It’s hard to believe I’ve had some sort of web presence for 20 years. Wow I feel old. How about a trip down memory lane? The middle of my sophomore year in college was a pivotal time for me in life. I had two years of hard sciences under my belt with a…
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5 tips I learned selling on eBay
Up until recently I’ve been a casual user of eBay. I’ve purchased random things like ink cartridges for my printer, hard to find items for my motorcycle, and even a few specific apparel items. I’ve also used eBay as a way to calculate value for items donated to charity. It’s a decent way to assess…
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PHP and JIRA’s REST API
At my last job I needed generate release notes for each version of software that we shipped to customers. I created a PHP script to pull the status of issues in JIRA and generate HTML output which contained key fields such as key, summary, priority, and resolution. I could link that output to the release.…
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Copying WordPress Locally
I’ve been using WordPress for about six years now and think it’s a truly great piece of technology. I love using it for my blog and have deployed word press on a number of other sites around the web. One of the things I’ve struggled with though is copying a WordPress instance down to my…
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WordPress Sydney: Scaling content in WordPress
When I first started building websites, I was all about Dreamweaver. I worked at Macromedia and it was important to have a web presence to not only test Dreamweaver but to establish myself on the web. My basic HTML website then became powered by Serendipity and now WordPress. WordPress is truly an amazing piece of…
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JIRA: Looking out for motorcycle riders since 2013
It’s no secret from this blog that I’m an avid motorcycle rider. About 9 months ago, the tech chair and I moved all of our club operations onto JIRA and Confluence using Atlassian’s generous community licensing model. In fair disclosure, I do work for Atlassian and blog a fair amount about JIRA at work on…
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JIRA, Confluence, and Stash Ride Motorcycles – Agile for Bikers
Agile for Motorcycles? It is no surprise I love to ride motorcycles. I’ve been riding with my current group for going on three years. Some time ago the tech chair approached me about using a issue tracker to manage the club business. I laughed. We were a motorcycle club! After becoming president, three years of…
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Moving Beyond Dual Boot
Starting with dual boot For as long as I can remember I’ve had a dual boot setup up on my computer. That effectively means there are two different operating systems on the computer. I would run Windows for all of the mainstream applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver (yes I know they got…
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Adobe Creative Cloud?
Many years ago I was very much against the idea of “renting” software. When you buy a product, it’s nice to know that you have “purchased” something so that that item can continually return value for it’s useful life. As software versions have become more and more blurry with the ease of updates, the fundamental…
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First Impressions: Apple Maps
Apple Computer has been getting a lot of bad press lately due to the removal of Google Maps from iOS and it’s replacement of Apple’s own mapping application. Rumor has it that Apple wanted Google to do turn by turn directions but Google refused and limited that feature to the Android platform. Apple then teamed…
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Automate Everything
I’m preparing a set of images for upload for a future blog post and started to make the edits in Photoshop but quickly became frustrated with the work required. For each image I had to: The problem was not everything was clean when I expanded the images in step 2 so getting a smooth edge…
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Terrestrial radio
Sometimes I think that I am the only person that listens to over the air radio. Most of my friends have upgraded to satellite radio, listen to their iPod, or enjoy a format that is not available over terrestrial radio. One of the advantages of listening to country music is that there are typically stations…
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Evaluation: Dragon Naturally Speaking
I’ve been an iPhone user for about 2 1/2 years now and I have to finally say I’m a convert. One experience however that I don’t enjoy on the iPhone is typing. I don’t find that the capacitive keyboard is near as good as the mechanical counterpart. Nuance came out with the Dragon app that…
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Ignite Boulder 18
Ignite Boulder is a pretty awesome event. They hold it at the Boulder Theater a few times a year. Unfortunately, I took the photo after they had changed the sign! The premise is simple: each speaker has 5 minutes to speak. Each presentation must have exactly 20 slides and each slide advances every 15 seconds. …
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SSH without Passwords
I’ve been using a Mac now at work for just about all of my activities. We have a fair number of UNIX hosts that I need to work with and I’ve heard you can log in using SSH without passwords but have never been able to get it to work right. I’ve now found a…
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Batch Scanning Photos the Fast Way
Recently I had to take a set of slides exported out of PowerPoint and turn them into slides again. While the process was totally backwards, it generally worked for the purposes of the meeting. When PowerPoint exports slides, it puts 6 slides on a page in PDF form. So to get them back into slides, …
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Ubuntu: Listing All Installed Packages
I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 and had some massive issues with Ubuntu running Thunderbird. Since Unity, the new UI software never really worked all that well, I decided it was time to wipe my settings. Now that I’ve moved all the files in my home direcotry to another directory I can’t log in. Moving…
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Thank You Steve
I’ll admit I’ve been a fan of the PC be it in Windows or Linux form. It wasn’t until 2004 that I really began to use the Macintosh when I was a QA lead for Dreamweaver. I’d used Mac OS 9 in school and that product never resonated with me. After the release of Mac…
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Jira + Crowd: Adding new users
One of the cool new things I learned at conference on was how to shorten the time required to add new users into Jira. We have Jira hooked up to a Crowd SSO server in our office. When we’d onboard a new group we’d have to go through the following steps: We’d asked the Atlassian…