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 …
UPDATE – Read Hacking a Fireplace – Revisited for an alternative approach to this hack. I’ve been building my home automation system for years and have achieved extensive lighting, climate, entertainment, security and entry control. Never satisfied, I’m forever pondering potential refinements that would enhance the overall effectiveness and capability of my system. I recently …
I’ve worked with a LOT of genealogy software applications over the years and all of them have left me, for one reason or another, unsatisfied. I started experimenting with The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, also known as TNG, back in mid-2010, but really started digging deep into the application over the past few months. …
Back in February of this year, I released a Greasemonkey Script that would modify the theme from the Hack A Day site so it was a little easier on my “old eyes”! The script works by changing CSS and HTML elements after they have been received by my browser. The good folks over at Hack …
