As a rule, I don’t help family and friends with their computer needs! That said, I make two and ONLY two exceptions to that rule, one of which is my Mom. A couple of weeks ago, she called me complaining that her laptop was randomly powering-down. I went over to have a look and decided …
If you have regular web sites that you visit, I bet I’m safe in guessing that at least one of them has something about it that you wish was different. You know what I mean — a different background color, larger fonts, menus in a different location, etc. That site for me is “Hack A …
The current issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has an article on cryptography that outlines the use of the Vernam Cipher (aka One-time pad) to encrypt text by hand. What makes this technique interesting is its ease of implementation, but even more interesting than that is the fact that the Vernam Cipher is the only …
When we receive a first-time visitor to our home they ALWAYS ask about the whole-home control panel mounted in our family room. This panel allows us to control and obtain status on just about every aspect of our house from a single location. This, invariably, leads to questions about what my Home Automation (HA) system …
My little girl hit a new milestone today by learning to ride her bike! Getting here, I can honestly attest, has been a very bumpy ride (pun intended), but alas she prevailed! Let me start with a little bit of context. Every child is different. I put my son on a bike at about five …
I bought myself a gasoline power-washer last year to replace my old washer and was really pleased with its performance. At the beginning of summer this year, I set up my new washer for my annual outdoor cleaning. I hooked everything up and gave the engine a pull. As expected it cranked right up and …
Most of my computer time is spent on my Mac inside the gorgeous OS/X GUI using the tools that are necessary for me to run my business. Many of my side projects, however, take me back to my beloved Bash Shell which I can use on my Mac, where it gets plenty of use, but …
Have you ever wished you could create a list of all of the email addresses that you have communicated with over the years? Perhaps you’re building an email distribution list or need to notify everyone that you’re changing your address. Whatever the reason, the task is very simple if you are using an email client …
If you tinker with technology then chances are you already know what the “Internet of Things” is all about. If you don’t know, then my question to you is, where have you been!? For those of you not in the know, here’s a quick primer. “The Internet of Things is a network of Internet-enabled objects, …
In my first post, in this three-part series, I wrote about how I physically interfaced my Ademco Alarm Panel to my Home Automation computer. In this article, I will show you how to capture the data stream that comes through that interface, how to parse it and then how to make use of it in …
