I recently bought a couple of Dayton Audio MA1240a Twelve Channel Multi-Zone Amplifiers to power the speakers I have throughout my home. What drew me to this particular amp was its fair price and the fact that it has an “Auto” setting that senses a signal on the RCA line-level inputs that is supposed to …
Back in February 2013 I wrote an article entitled “Hacking a Fireplace”. In that article I wrote about how I used an Arduino to create an interface that would allow me to directly control my fireplaces from my home automation system. That solution worked great and I was successful in running two fireplaces from the …
Have you ever written a blog post and then tried to post it to Facebook, only to have it format incorrectly or not display an image? The Geek-Tips blog is powered by WordPress and leverages various plugins and customizations and, for the most part, functions without issue. When I finish writing a post, I like …
My regular readers know that I have implemented an extensive home automation system that allows full control and automation of everything from doors to lights to fireplaces to full multi-zone temperature management and includes various tracking and reporting functionality. One of the items that I’ve been tracking for years is the level of ink in …
One of the ongoing challenges with changing a web site’s look and feel with client-side scripting is that it oftentimes breaks when the site’s theme is modified. There are a lot of you out there that use my Hack-a-Day Greasemonkey script so I wanted to make my most recent updates available. Just as before, I’m …
I’m a bit of an armchair genealogist and, as time permits, I indulge myself in as much research as I can, often leveraging a myriad of online resources as I pursue my subjects. One of the sites that I frequently use is Findagrave.com. It’s a fantastic resource whose content is provided by folks, like me, …
There’s no doubt about it, setting up a mail server can be a daunting task. Luckily, there are plenty of options available these days that negate the need for setting up your own server, but if you want total control of your mail platform then the only way to get that control is to do …
If you’ve ever tried to subscribe to a public iCloud Calendar from Google Calendar then you have, no doubt, discovered that it doesn’t work. The problem stems from Apple’s use of the robots.txt file on it’s calendar servers to prevent the indexing of public calendar data by index spiders from Google, Yahoo and others. Google …
Adding iCloud Calendar Subscriptions to Google Calendar Read More »
I’ve been wanting to replace my 17” Macbook with a new laptop running Linux for quite some time now. I replaced my Macbook Air with a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu a few months ago, and that’s been working GREAT! Unfortunately, Dell doesn’t make a 17” XPS model, so after a bit of research, I …
Ubuntu 13.04 on the Dell Inspiron 17R Special Edition Read More »
Over the past six or seven years, I’ve managed to build-up quite a repertoire of Apple hardware products. As OS/X progresses, unfortunately, some of my older hardware just isn’t able to perform with the latest OS in a way that makes the machine useful. This, most recently, was an issue with one of my Mac …
