Category: Technology
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…