It's taken me some time to even get to the place where I wanted to stop and think about 2020. We're just over 2 months into 2021 and I've been thinking about writing this since December, but between being plain old tired (physically and mentally) and being busy, every time …

Given it's the holidays and that's when I tend to have time and energy to poke around the house, I decided to upgrade my FreeNAS box to the newer TrueNAS 12 release. The upgrade itself went without a hitch, simply switching from the FreeNAS 11 train to the TrueNAS 12 …

While the Alberta government has some excellent visualizations about COVID-19 statistics in Alberta, I felt there was a little too much missing. The province is quite transparent and you can export the data in CSV. Since these days most of my "technical work" is dorking around in spreadsheets, I fiddled …

I was recently interviewed by my friend Jack Wallen (whom I've known for 20 years as he actually coerced me to start writing for TechRepublic ages ago!). It was about a topic near and dear to my heart: CVSS (or Common Vulnerability Scoring System). With the explosion of security scanning …

Yesterday we had someone at our home to look at replacing the front and back doors. The rep for the company was exceptionally personable and we probably spent more time with him than the simple transaction of selecting and ordering new doors for our home warranted, but my wife and …

I have a terrible memory, which means that I rely on a lot of tools and methodologies (like GTD, Getting Things Done) to help me track things. This also means that I have a lot of different tools ,and I regularly re-evaluate and change them if something new can meet …

I've been running FreeNAS as a file and application server for quite a while and love it. The FreeBSD jails are awesome for running applications like Plex or gitea in isolation. Recently the base FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE went end of life and 11.3-RELEASE was the new stable version (actually …

I've enjoyed reading (and writing) these annual retrospectives. This will be the fourth that I've written. There are two recurring themes I read from the past retrospectives: tough and hope. Life is tough -- be that in work or personal life. But there is hope. Every year I look back and …

I've had a Unifi Security Gateway for over a year now but never had the time or patience to make it work properly. Turns out my ISP really likes to cache MAC addresses so getting the USG to present the pfSense MAC address solved the problem pretty quick. The rest …

I recently got another yubikey and due to poor handling of the old key (can't load it onto the new card) I've generated a new key. I've revoked my old 2017 key (key id 0xBD51CB9670DF9DE7) and replaced with my new key (key id 0xDAE4D06F77191ACD)

My new key's fingerprint is:

AD05 …