When you wake up in the morning and see that your iPhone is giving you a “No SIM detected” error, you know it is going to be a bad day. My iPhone 5s is well aged, but it has performed quite well for almost 2.5 years. I was hoping to get another year out of it, but alas, it decided to give up the ghost. It worked well, but the “No SIM” error was a harbinger of doom. It is...
As I am looking to create a more formal, shall we say “professional” web presence, I am learning a few things. First, while my personal sites (like here) are self hosted, and currently managed by myself on Digital Ocean, I want something where I know that if I screw up I don’t lose it all. There are plenty of options, but as I am familiar with WordPress, and even got my start on...
This last week, I “discovered” something that wasn’t really hidden. Somewhere in the evolution of Apple’s iCloud service, in particular the sharing of login information and passwords in the service, a really cool feature is lurking. On Tuesday, Barbara had a 2 hour procedure at her doctor’s office, and I waited in the lobby. So I took my iPad and logged into their...
A recent life change (that is the understatement of the century) is providing me with time to improve my fitness. Being a “get out and do something” kind of guy, that means walking, hiking, cycling. In the last week, I have done 30 miles of walking (5 days of 6 mile walks), and one 18 mile bike ride. While it is too soon to see tangible results, I definitely feel better, and the...
Restaurant Review – Sinaloa Cafe When I lived in San Jose in the past, one of my favorite places to eat was a little Morgan Hill staple, Sinaloa Cafe. Solid Mexican cuisine, fun atmosphere, and packed on Friday and Saturday nights. Sadly, their original building burned down a few months before we left San Jose for Tucson, and I lost touch. I heard that they rebuilt, and moved closer to...
You find flaws in the oddest areas, this time syncing with google apps contacts was destroying my battery life.
Anyone who has known me in real life, and via my vehicles on the web know that I am an Apple computer fan. And passionate for my beliefs. There are many reasons why, but top of the list is that stuff just works. Case in point, our old Epson 4490 Flatbed scanner. We bought it probably 6 or more years ago, when we needed to digitize some photographs. It was well rated for that, and it had/has good...
Sales, marketing, what do these words bring to mind? It depends on your proximity, and susceptibility, but to many they bring about as much loathing as the dreaded “lawyer”. However dreadful the concept of sales and marketing are to the common person, it is clear that they core concepts work. While this is hardly a “fun” introduction, it is an important framing device for...
A recent life change is forcing me to become more organized, and to remove chaos from some areas. One key area is my digital address book(s). Over the years, with my haphazard adoption of new technologies and platforms, it was inevitable that my growing list of contacts split among several services, would fester and be a moldering mess. There are definite epochs in my contacts. The first...
At the beginning of the year, there was a monstrous downtime at my host that was the final straw. I has a VPS there for a little over 2 years, and while at first it was rock solid and awesome, it had become less reliable through the summer of 2015. There were several down times, that were resolved with a reboot, or restarting the Apache server, or the mysql server. Not too big of a deal. Then the...