Why mess with a good thing? — I recently undertook an effort to migrate my Synology 920+ from an ext4 to btrfs format. This project was meant to right a wrong when I upgraded to the 920+ from a 213. Prompted with the installation wizard, I did some minimal research on the difference in the formats, and…

I need help photo editing, and I need it bad. — I have been in a photography rut for the past few years. There are several reasons I suspect, and on this past New Year’s Eve I was tempted to buy a fix for it. …

The best way to learn something is by writing about it — I’m currently studying for the AWS Certified Security — Specialty exam, and the amount of material surrounding encryption and the Key Management Service (KMS) is a bit daunting. After a few close passing grades on practice exams, and moving my exam twice, I decided to write a few posts on…

One or two: my journey in modernizing myself — Take a trip down memory lane with me. You walk into a classroom filled with computers with wooden boxes covering their keyboards. Depending on your age you either launch a program or grab a floppy disk from your teacher, but the results are the same and you enter into a…

It’s simple to backup your memories with little effort and little cost — If you’re like me, and the title interested you, you have a local NAS in your home office to run your own private cloud. Dump all your data there, serve it up to all of your devices, and spend hours, days, or weeks getting it just right. On the other…

Your tweets can be more secure than your savings account. — October was Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and I feel like my inbox was peppered with emails from banks that talked about how I should take more steps to secure my financial life. While reading these emails I was reminded of 2FactorAuth.org, a site I’ve visited in the past, but one that…

A 2020 look at the free home network solution. — One of the items that has been on my list to implement as part of my 2020 commitment to taking back my digital self has been experimenting with Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi. …

Actually it’s a hobby that will take up your time and money, but it’s really worth it. I promise. — One of the best things you can do to grow both your knowledge and your career is building out your own homelab. It allows you to build skills in tools you don’t normally get to access at work, test out processes and software that you could recommend for your company’s…

Multiple copies, syncing, off-network processing, and backups are one NAS away — I’ve always found the way Adobe Lightroom CC Classic manages its catalogs to be a bit limiting. The main issue is that it has to be on the local machine, which limits some redundancy and ease of use for people that edit photos on multiple systems. I’ve developed a workflow…