Tralfaz

Category: Technology

For general technology related items

  • Free at last

    Free at last

    In October 2013, I woke up one day to the news that my hosting provider, MediaTemple, had been bought by GoDaddy. That set off a furious search to find a new home for my web properties. I moved all my hosting away within a few days, but I only moved my domains away after they expired.

    Except for two, I just kept getting lazy when the renewal time happened, and at $15 per year (versus $8.92 with my new registrar) it wasn’t a big deal to leave things as they were.

    Until last Friday. I got the notification that both WordsByBarbara and ScriptsByBarbara were coming due for renewal. (more…)

  • Music Mess

    Music Mess

    My music collection is a mess. They say that the first step is admitting you have a problem. And boy do I have a problem.

    I have nobody to blame but myself.

    How did I get here?

    I first started collecting music back in high school. Of course, back then, the state of the art was dragging a rock along a jagged groove and then amplifying the signal through loud speakers. But, while that might be the start of my collection, that isn’t the root cause of my chaos today. (more…)

  • My VPS Journey

    My VPS Journey

    When I began my web journey, oh so long ago (it was 2009), I was somewhat naive. At the time, I was looking for a solid performance, a provider that seemed competent and professional, and made it easy for someone who knows just enough to be dangerous.

    Shared Hosting

    At the time, shared hosting was the rage, and there were several options, even then. I settled on MediaTemple as a provider, and I was happy. They made no promises about “unlimited” things like disk space and bandwidth, and the few times I needed support, they were great. They weren’t cheap, ad $20 a month, but they worked. (more…)

  • Streaming Video Notes

    Streaming Video Notes

    I do not watch much “regular” television. I have my Tivo set to record MotoGP, I have some of my favorite old TV shows set to record on MeTV (currently “Perry Mason” and “Get Smart”), and I simply can’t live without “Full Frontal”. Other than that, I watch Netflix, and am in general satisfied with that.

    Netflix

    (more…)

  • Vintage Computing – Atari

    Vintage Computing – Atari

    One of the things about being old is reminiscing about the “good ol’ days”. Most people think about their athleticism, or past loves. Me, I remember my first computer. An Atari 800 8-bit system that I bought in 1980 with my paper route money.

    I greatly enjoyed that experience. Of course, my first taste of personal computing was on the Apple ][ systems at Prospect High School, but they were far outside my budget (at the time, an Apple 2 with one disk drive, and a monochrome monitor was a smidgen over $2,000.)

    The Atari, with a disk drive, and plugged into a TV was a good starting point. But I needed to begin collecting software. So, I got a modem, a Hayes 300 baud, the 850 interface box, and I was off to the races. (more…)

  • AWS Experimentation – WordPress basic installation

    AWS Experimentation – WordPress basic installation

    This weekend, on a lark, I decided to do some experimentation with Amazon’s AWS services. I have been using their S3 for backing up my home Mac for a while, but since I use Arq it was really not a serious dive into the AWS infrastructure. However, when I started down that path, I had to do some interesting things, like create an IAM user profile, and the like.

    Then I saw some tutorials that looked interesting, including one on how to setup a WordPress instance on an EC2 virtual machine. Since I have setup many WordPress sites, on a variety of hosting solutions, I thought why not give it a throw?

    Fortunately, for the first year you are a customer, you have access to a “Free Tier” that pretty much allows you to run 1 VM solutions up to 750 hours each month. More than enough to play without paying.

    The TL;DR answer: Is isn’t difficult, but there are some extra steps that AWS brings into it than using a major hosting site, even one where you start with a plain VM (like Digital Ocean). It gets you closer to the iron, and you can’t help but to gain an appreciation for the background processes that are in play. (more…)

  • A Labor of Love – Doc Savage

    A Labor of Love – Doc Savage

    I recently posted about finally finding a workflow to properly convert a cache of old Doc Savage books to ePub files.

    In the last installment, I used Calibre to convert the original BBeB format (Sony) files into rich text files. Then I was using Nisus Writer Pro to clean them up, and then finally copy the text to Apple Pages for the final tweaks.

    This was workable, but I learned a few things, and improved my processes:

    First – OCR Conversion issues

    (more…)

  • Doc Savage eBook Fun

    Doc Savage eBook Fun

    When I got my first eBook “Reader,” a Sony PRS-700, in 2008, I went stumbling around for books.

    One of the things I stumbled on was an archive of the 180+ Doc Savage books, in .lrf format, for the Sony Reader series. (yes, I am aware that they were not “legal” to download, so if you are offended you can move away now).

    The .lrf format worked great on the old Sony reader. Table of contents, chapters, and all navigation worked.

    Cool. (more…)

  • Amazon Music – A review

    Amazon Music – A review

    I have in the past blogged extensively around the streaming music services, and my waffling back and forth until I chose my current preferences – Apple Music for the on demand streaming, and Pandora for ‘radio’. Both have a place in my dock, and I don’t mind paying for them.

    Along the way, I compared Google Play, Amazon, Spotify (a former winner) as well as the two I settled on.

    Amazon’s music offering was not chosen because it had a less than satisfactory web app, and the iOS app was weak. A benefit was access to much free music just due to my Prime subscription, but again, that list and roster kept changing (and it still does). This was before their plan to give access to their whole library “Unlimited Music” (for $7.99 a month – prime subscriber price, or $14.99 for all members of a family). A latecomer, they are entering a crowded market, but have made a solid entry. (Launched on October 12, 2016) (more…)

  • Crap, time for another Raspberry Pi

    Crap, time for another Raspberry Pi

    It seems like yesterday that I just got my Raspberry Pi II, and now there is a 3rd generation that is out there. Dag nabbit, I guess I will have to get with the program.

    And, also, get back on my project of creating a remote weather station, and a camera to mount to my house to capture an analemma. Sigh, the future is bright. (more…)