Category: General

I’ve long thought of myself as a mobilist. I love portable and mobile technology and being able to do whatever I want to do wherever I want to do it. It’s this love of mobile technology that bred my intense interest in iOS. The technology is emerging that makes this kind of portability easier almost…

I’ve been rethinking Apple Pencil recently. The first thought is that it would be much more useful to me if I were better about using it. But with that out of the way, I wonder how effective tool Apple Pencil really is? If I’m taking notes or need to do a substantial amount of writing,…

2023 has been a difficult year health wise. As a result of some of those events, much has been made of my need to destress. I’m a technology guy so naturally when my doc tells me to reduce stress I look for an app for that, and have found two in a category I previously…

I’m an IT guy, and as such, I’m also a data guy, a numbers guy, I’m a guy who loves hard quantifiable numbers for just about anything. The more quantifiable something is, the more useful the data is to me. Well that’s something that’s been challenged for me in the past couple of weeks, and…

I used to think of mindfulness as being synonymous with meditation. And while certainly meditation can play a role in mindfulness there seems to be more to it than that. Mindfulness I’m discovering seems more about being present, in the present moment, and being capable of dealing with whatever else is present in that moment…

DNS is Domain Naming System (some say Domain Name Services) and is a foundational building block of the internet. In it’s simplest form, it is a lookup tool. A way to resolve names to IP addresses. Remember when we used phone books? If you knew your friend Bob lived on Main St., using his name…

By now many of you know that I like to do use things as “out of the box” as possible, that is, with minimal amounts of customization and tailoring. This past week I happened across another example of exactly why I like to do things that way. Of course another thing I enjoy is WordPress,…

Lists are a favorite thing of mine. I use them for all sorts of things. I especially like Mailing lists. This year my organization is changing the tool they use for managing lists and a really wonderful tool is being used to replace it: Microsoft Teams. Among the tasks that Teams does very well as…

Collaboration is a word we hear a lot more lately than we did just a few years ago. There have been several companies to enter the collaboration space with products like Slack and Discord, and even Webex to a certain extent, but the Goliath that all of the Davids would like to tumble is Microsoft…

Artificial Intelligence is a buzzword we’ve been hearing a lot lately, and for all the hoopla, I’m still not completely sure about what it is, and how it’s going to be used. On the surface of course, it is intelligence that is artificial, that is, not organic and that’s fine, but that isn’t really the…

Technology reaches so many aspects of our lives, one of the most popular it seems is healthcare. We have apps for tracking fitness, sleep, calories, medications, wellness, and mindfulness not to mention the apps from our healthcare providers to remind us of after care instructions from our appointments. Each of the apps are helpful in…

Growth is something that needs to happen in life. Personal growth, professional growth, growth in every area of everything we do. I was listening to the transformed podcast recently where they were discussing professional growth in the context of Higher Ed and wouldn’t it be nice if people were able to stay connected to an…

I heard a podcast recently featuring Nicole Nguyen who spoke on coping with the rising cost of digital subscriptions. She mentioned things like: As I thought through that, I realize that many people now have most of those services and probably more, and I wondered if there was a better way of doing things, or…

Today, we are not binding our Macs to Active Directory as we’d done in years past. It used to be that binding Macs to Active Directory provided some real benefits as it related to GPO and shared network resources. Policies could be assigned and network resources could be allocated in ways that couldn’t be done…

I heard a quote recently that really resonated with me. Technology is everything and for everyone. And increasingly, it’s most useful when we don’t notice it all.  Shira Ovide I’d never put it in those words before, but for 30 years that I’ve been involved with technology that’s been the idea that drives how I…

Technology is an odd thing sometimes, especially when you talk about updating it and when it becomes obsolete. I’ve seen four year old laptops discarded by organizations! Personally, I use computers and other devices long past the four year mark. Mostly because I haven’t got the money to replace everything every four years, but also…

This time on web sites, or more specifically, within WordPress. I discovered recently quite by accident, that you shouldn’t use your administrative un/pw to create content. It’s just a really bad practice. So I’ve spent a good bit of time today straightening that out. If someone knows the user name of the admin of a…

Full Site Editing or FSE is something that’s been touted loudly in recent months. It became popular with recent releases of WordPress and continues to get more robust as other releases come out. Maybe a better way to say it is that it gets more mature. In order to take advantage of FSE you have…

There is a growing trend in business to use messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack more and more to not only reduce the amount of mail in our inbox, but also get more immediate responses from people, and while I’m a enthusiastic advocate of M365 including Teams, I’m not convinced this shift is a…

I spend a lot of time thinking about mobility and portability with technology. It’s a favorite thing of mine being able to do whatever I want to do where ever I want to do it from. It’s the catalyst for me being an iOS guy, and one of the reasons I accessorize the way I…

As a minimalist, and a mobilist, Every Day Carry is something I put a lot of thought into. The gear and the bags I carry are small and light, selected with portability in mind. Depending on what we do and where we’re going, there isn’t a “one size fits all” solution to everyday carry, so…

IT has changed a lot in the past 30 years. We used to bend over our magnification lamps and solder on boards, unbox and deploying PCs sometimes by the hundreds and pull cable through ceiling and floor. With the advent of disposable or user swappable components, virtual machines that are assigned to us where the…

Windows is full of surprises for me, which is surprising in and of itself given that I’ve been supporting it for getting up on 30 years now. One of the most consistent surprises for me is the network troubleshooter which resolves more problems for me than I imagined a Windows tool would, but that’s a…

So it’s been about a week now that macOS Monterey has been released and I’ve installed in half a dozen times or so on a variety of Macs and haven’t had any significant problems. The feature I most wanted was Universal Control, and that didn’t make it in to the final release however, instead, we…

Recently I was at a WordPress meetup where the focus of the discussion was on plugins. As a budding WordPress enthusiast, I was eager to learn what plugins the seasoned WordPress veterans were using. I was surprised when the presenter opened her web site and only had four or five plugins installed. She expertly described…

I heard recently that the phrase ‘The New Normal’ is becoming obsolete. It’s being replaced with ‘The Now Normal’. The thought being that things change so rapidly now that what was normal yesterday may not be the norm today. Change is occurring at a pace it hasn’t previously. Remote work, security concerns, cloud based services,…

I’m a big advocate of supporting and encouraging whatever work style people find productive. More so as we become entrenched in this pandemical, work from home mentality or culture or whatever the right word is. Among my least favorite things is a mess of cables. While sometimes it’s necessary, it’s often avoidable, and it’s those…

Working from home. Boy have we heard enough about that this year. What works, what doesn’t, dos and don’ts of setting up your home office, how to team build with remote teams, the list goes on. I don’t know if it was a radio program or a blog I was reading but I came across…

MSPs or Managed Solutions Providers are companies that endeavor to provide IT services to small and medium sized companies who’s industry is not IT.  At its inception, it was a good idea, IT is never good for a company’s bottom line.  It’s expensive and not revenue producing.  So if a small company can outsource their…

Community: A group of people who are called together, who love each other.  That definition comes from a documentary called “Almost Real: Connecting In A Wired World”. When I consider the world we live in, I think about the changes that technology has brought about, and the things it will continue to bring about, and…

Working for an MSP can be challenging on a good day.  The nature of the business includes taking over management of networks that others have managed before us (or tried to!) and supporting things that we often did not setup ourselves. Among those challenges are things like Active Directory, Group Policies, and file permissions. Recently…

Covid has changed so much about the way we work. Some employers have said that employees won’t be returning to the office this year at least, so this work from home time may become protracted. Considering this extended period, some businesses have been forced to reconsider their business model in part, especially wholesalers of office…