tag: Technology

This is part 2 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore several alternatives for the most common programs that the average user is likely to use, along with a few o their pros and cons. If you watch most of the Linux related videos on Youtube it becomes apparent pretty quickly that most of those videos are aimed at “power users”. That is, they get pretty deeply into the inner workings of the operating system, often using a range of commandline tools to get work done. The average user, particularly the new ones coming from Windows aren’t really interested in those details. They want to know how to get things done. Preferably, using tools that are similar to, and as easy to use, as the one’s they’ve become accustomed to on Windows. ...

This is part 1 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore the reasons for the move and examine the two main alternatives together with their benefits and challenges. Its seems that many people are looking to move away from MS Windows. There are at least a couple of reasons for this: Windows 10 support has come to end of life. This, together with changes to Windows 11 that essentially renders many computers – even fairly recent ones – useless as they no longer meet the requirements. This alone has caused a lot of folks to look else where. A lot of people don’t like the idea that Microsoft now requires that you have a Microsoft account in order to access your computer. This also, of course, means that your files are in the cloud, which is a situation that makes some folks (maybe many?) uncomfortable. Today I want to take a look at the two primary alternatives to Windows. But, before I do that, I want to point out that I’m looking at what I believe the average user wants and and needs in a computer, not at what the tech nerds consider important. One of the greatest challenges for the average person is making sense of all the gobbledygook that the tech nerds spew. You just want a system that works and lets you get your work done and that’s what I’m aiming to address. ...

While I still spend quite a lot of time viewing Youtube videos on various topics, including technology, I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of many of those videos. Now, I watch them for two reasons: To learn about new technologies, equipment, software, etc; and, to learn actual skills for using those technologies. That is, I might watch a video to discover the pros and cons of a particular piece of software or hardware. Or, I might watch in order to learn how to do something with one of the technologies I’m already using. So, what’s the problem? ...

There are four things that have become increasingly irritating to me: The increase in advertising in damn near everything; The expectation that everything requires an app; The increasing “connectedness” of the things we use; and, the shift to a subscription model for almost all software. Today I want to focus on the subscription model. The Issue The main issue is that so many software companies have shifted to a subscription model for their software. But it’s not just software. Certain “features” of appliances and cars, and it seems many other things that we use and depend on have increasingly starting requiring subscriptions for their use. Some of this parallels the increasing expectation that we will be online and connected and a shift toward connected services which basically means that unless you are connected you don’t have access to those services. ...

For the last year or so I’ve been running a Proxmox server that hosts several virtual machines (VM) one of which, itself, hosts multiple docker images for services on which I rely. In addition to the VMs, I also run several LXC containers on the Proxmox server that provide some additional resources I frequently use. While watching some videos a few days ago I ran across a video where the presenter was demonstrating the use of XCP-ng. If you’re not familiar, XCP-ng is similar to Proxmox in that it is a type 1 hypervisor. A type 1 hypervisor is the operating system that allows one to run multiple VMs as if they were on the bare metal. ...

As I’ve noted in several prior posts I self-host a fair number of services on my local devices. Now, there are any number of reasons why someone would choose to self host. For some people it is the challenge of learning new skills. For others it’s about having a sense of control over your data. For others, still, it’s about ensuring the future availability of services as it’s well known that many services fall to the wayside overtime and nothing is more frustrating than to become accustomed to using a particular service only to have it disappear one day. ...

Periodically I pause and wonder at the changes that have taken place over the last 30 years and how much the internet has infiltrated our lives. And, like many others, I wonder whether the ubiquity of the internet is a good or bad thing. I started my own internet journey in the late 1980’s with a dial up connection to Prodigy. Over time I moved through AOL, then Compuserve, then to a local provider, Homnet, in Warner Robins, GA. It would be several more years before I was connected full-time. ...

The Downside of Homelabbing and Home Automation I love learning about home labbing and home automation. I’ve been homelabbing now for about 10 years. My fascination with home automation goes back even further to the late 1990s when I first ran across the X-10 technologies. Today you read and hear almost nothing about X-10, even though it is apparently still around.1 I didn’t do well with X-10 and at the time didn’t really have a lot of opportunities or money to play with the technology. More recently, though, I’ve gotten more into the home automation space. I’m by no means an expert: I just like to tinker. But as I’ve automated more and more of my home – lights, HVAC, garage door, etc – I’ve also begun to see a downside with all of this. I’ll get to that in a moment. ...

My OpenBSD Experiment is Over Well, this is a day that I really wasn’t quite expecting. I had high hopes that I would be able to use OpenBSD for quite a while before moving on to another OS but, alas, that was not to be. I am writing this on Linux Mint, having returned to that after my experiment. To say that I’m a bit sad about this state of affairs is an understatement. ...

Using AI in Education I’ve read quite a number of articles recently about the use of AI in education. Specifically, there’s be a good bit of discussion around whether students should use AI in completing assignments. Strangely, it seems there’s a fair number of folks that believe that it’s perfectly fine for students to do this. I disagree. School work, whether homework or in-class work has one goal: to help the student to ingest and process information in a way that aids them in recalling and using that information later in life or in other situations. In order for this goal to be acheived, it is imperative that they use that information, recalling it, applying it to different scenarios, looking for links to related information, and so on. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, in their book make it stick (ISBN:978-0-674-72901-8) points out that using information in ways that matter is the key to effective, long-term learning. Using AI to complete a task bypasses that process so that in the end the student learns nothing, despite earning an “A” in the class. ...