# Jimiz.net - Technology and Life > Living a blessed life with technology --- ## Pages - [theme general settings](https://jimiz.net/theme-general-settings/) - [WordPress Management Tools](https://jimiz.net/wordpress-management-tools/) - [Privacy Policy](https://jimiz.net/privacy-policy/) - [Blog](https://jimiz.net/blog-list/) - [Blog](https://jimiz.net/blog/) - [Home](https://jimiz.net/) - [Newsletter](https://jimiz.net/newsletter/) - [Contact](https://jimiz.net/contact/) - [Calendar](https://jimiz.net/calendar/) - [iPad](https://jimiz.net/ipad/) - [About](https://jimiz.net/about/) - [IISreporter](https://jimiz.net/iisreporter/) --- ## Posts - [Self-Hosting, Claude Code, and Fixing My Doorbell in 10 Minutes](https://jimiz.net/self-hosting-claude-code-and-fixing-my-doorbell-in-10-minutes/) - [N8N Self-Hosting with SearXNG](https://jimiz.net/n8n-self-hosting-with-searxng/) - [N8N - Self-host with Docker- Postgresql, Redis, and Caddy](https://jimiz.net/n8n-self-host-with-docker-postgresql-redis-and-caddy/) - [Running My AI Locally with Ollama, n8n, and Supabase](https://jimiz.net/local-ai-with-ollama-n8n-supabase/) - [Cloudflare makes a bold move against AI Crawlers](https://jimiz.net/cloudflare-makes-a-bold-move-against-ai-crawlers/) - [AI Costs - Tokens and Credits](https://jimiz.net/ai-costs-tokens-and-credits/) - [Why I Still Self-Host After 20 Years](https://jimiz.net/selfhosting/) - [Building a Weather App with 4 AI Dev Tools: A Hands-On Comparison](https://jimiz.net/building-a-weather-app-with-4-ai-dev-tools-a-hands-on-comparison/) - [How I Use n8n for Business and Personal Automation](https://jimiz.net/how-i-use-n8n-for-business-and-personal-automation/) - [Why I'm All In on Cloudflare (And You Should Be Too)](https://jimiz.net/why-im-all-in-on-cloudflare-and-you-should-be-too/) - [Running an AI LLM locally - Testing out DeepSeek](https://jimiz.net/running-an-ai-llm-locally-testing-out-deepseek/) - [Macbook Upgrade and challenges](https://jimiz.net/macbook-upgrade-and-challenges/) - [Long Overdue Update - 2025](https://jimiz.net/long-overdue-update-2025/) - [Fever vs Wings: WNBA Showdown Ignites as Clark, Boston Battle Howard in Playoff Push](https://jimiz.net/fever-vs-wings-wnba-showdown-ignites-as-clark-boston-battle-howard-in-playoff-push/) - [Python 3 on MacOS](https://jimiz.net/python-3-on-macos/) - [How to find your Wifi Password on a Mac](https://jimiz.net/how-to-find-your-wifi-password-on-a-mac/) - [NFT Craziness - What is an NFT](https://jimiz.net/nft-craziness-what-is-an-nft/) - [Working from Home Suggestions - Comfort](https://jimiz.net/working-from-home-suggestions-comfort/) - [Opera Browser - Daily Driver for 3 years](https://jimiz.net/opera-browser-daily-driver-for-3-years/) - [Amazfit Bip S](https://jimiz.net/amazfit-bip-s/) - [Xfinity Injecting a Message in my browser](https://jimiz.net/xfinity-injecting-a-message-in-my-browser/) - [Blog Update](https://jimiz.net/blog-update/) - [Amazfit Bip Review](https://jimiz.net/amazfit-bip-review/) - [Replace Windows Media Center - Kodi - Sad Day](https://jimiz.net/replace-windows-media-center-kodi-sad-day/) - [IIS Server Headers - Clickjacking - X-Frame-Options](https://jimiz.net/iis-server-headers-clickjacking-xframeoptions/) - [PPtP VPN macOS Sierra - Gone Missing](https://jimiz.net/pptp-vpn-macos-sierra-missing/) - [Bolt CMS - Great Simple CMS engine - Review](https://jimiz.net/bolt-cms-great-simple-cms-engine-review/) - [Magento Patch 7405 - Broken Image and Image Upload](https://jimiz.net/magento-patch-7405-broken-image-image-upload/) - [Dynamic DNS - Dyndns alternatives](https://jimiz.net/dynamic-dns-dyndns-alternatives/) - [Magento Patch - SUPEE-5994 - PEAR Error](https://jimiz.net/magento-patch-supee5994-pear-error/) - [Secure Home Network for Kids - Safe Browsing](https://jimiz.net/secure-home-network-kids-safe-browsing/) - [Wifi in Car - No More DVD's - Spring Break Tech](https://jimiz.net/wifi-car-dvds-spring-break-tech/) - [Lenovo ix2-dl NAS - Home Backup](https://jimiz.net/lenovo-ix2dl-nas-home-backup/) - [iPfire vs PFsense - Firewall Review](https://jimiz.net/ipfire-pfsense-firewall-review/) - [iPfire - ClamAV and Customization](https://jimiz.net/ipfire-clamav-customization/) - [Windows Media Center - Windows 8.1 ](https://jimiz.net/windows-media-center-windows-81/) - [ShellShock - How to test your system](https://jimiz.net/shellshock-test-system/) - [Change WordPress Theme from Database](https://jimiz.net/change-wordpress-theme-database/) - [Minimal Footprint online - No Google](https://jimiz.net/minimal-footprint-online-google/) - [What are you reading?](https://jimiz.net/reading/) - [VPN - Why you should use one](https://jimiz.net/vpn/) - [To use WWW or not - Naked Domains](https://jimiz.net/www-naked/) - [Selling domains](https://jimiz.net/selling-domains/) - [Quickbooks Alternative](https://jimiz.net/quickbooks-alternative/) - [Install phonegap 3 on Windows 8](https://jimiz.net/install-phonegap-3-windows-8/) - [Zentyal vs Pfsense Firewall Review](https://jimiz.net/zentyal-pfsense-firewall-review/) - [Wordpress and CDN](https://jimiz.net/wordpress-cdn/) - [Magento 1.8 has been released](https://jimiz.net/magento-18-released/) - [Google using your name and picture in ads - How to Opt Out](https://jimiz.net/google-picture-ads-opt/) - [Fun Computer Tricks (Possible Inappropriate tricks)](https://jimiz.net/fun-computer-tricks-dangerous/) - [Favicon–What / Why / and How](https://jimiz.net/faviconwhat-why-and-how/) - [Mobile Screenshots for presentations](https://jimiz.net/mobile-screenshots-for-presentations/) - [Web Developer Checklist](https://jimiz.net/web-developer-checklist/) - [Magento : Premature end of script headers: index.php](https://jimiz.net/magento-premature-script-headers-indexphp/) - [Thinkpad x1 Touch](https://jimiz.net/thinkpad-x1-touch/) - [Tech Travel ](https://jimiz.net/tech-travel/) - [Home Phone - Free using google talk](https://jimiz.net/home-phone-free-google-talk/) - [Printers - Home Laser Printer](https://jimiz.net/printers-home-laser-printer/) - [Giro Reverb - Commuter Helmet](https://jimiz.net/giro-reverb-commuter-helmet/) - [Check your Ubuntu Version - Command Line](https://jimiz.net/check-ubuntu-version-command-line/) - [Ubuntu or Mint](https://jimiz.net/ubuntu-mint/) - [iPad VPN - OpenVPN - PFsense](https://jimiz.net/ipad-vpn-openvpn-pfsense/) - [IIS 6 and .net 4 - 404 error](https://jimiz.net/iis-6-net-4-404-error/) - [RIP Google Reader](https://jimiz.net/rip-google-reader/) - [Backup Script for SQL Express](https://jimiz.net/backup-script-sql-express/) - [Suits and new Music](https://jimiz.net/suits-music/) - [Windows Mesh - Shutdown](https://jimiz.net/windows-mesh-shutdown/) - [Windows 8 - And tablet](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-tablet/) - [SoapUI WCF - An error occurred when verifying security for the message.](https://jimiz.net/soapui-wcf-error-occurred-verifying-security-message/) - [Mobile Detect Script](https://jimiz.net/mobile-detect-script/) - [Changing the Wordpress folder](https://jimiz.net/changing-wordpress-folder/) - [Disable Java - Homeland Security](https://jimiz.net/disable-java-homeland-security/) - [Fantastic Design and Invention](https://jimiz.net/fantastic-design-invention/) - [Windows 8 - App Store](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-app-store/) - [Search Windows App Store with Browser](https://jimiz.net/search-windows-app-store-browser/) - [Windows Store App Launch](https://jimiz.net/windows-store-app-launch/) - [Privacy Policy for Windows Store Apps - Example](https://jimiz.net/privacy-policy-windows-store-apps/) - [Zip Tar Gzip on Linux](https://jimiz.net/zip-tar-gzip-linux/) - [Windows Store App - Submission](https://jimiz.net/windows-store-app-submission/) - [Windows 8 Upgrade - Windows.old folder](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-upgrade-windowsold-folder/) - [Nest](https://jimiz.net/nest/) - [Windows Store App - Send Email](https://jimiz.net/windows-store-app-send-email/) - [Windows 8 Media Center - Remote Potato](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-media-center-remote-potato/) - [Windows 8 or Windows Store App Icons](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-windows-store-app-icons/) - [Pfsense - SARG (SQUID REPORTS) - 2012 v2](https://jimiz.net/pfsense-sarg-squid-reports/) - [Blogs I read - 2012](https://jimiz.net/blogs-read-2012/) - [Windows 8 - Close an application ](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-close-application/) - [Magento Debug and Modifications](https://jimiz.net/magento-debug-modifications/) - [RSS in Safari iOS 6](https://jimiz.net/rss-safari-ios-6/) - [Wireless fun - MDK3 on ubuntu 12](https://jimiz.net/wireless-fun-mdk3-ubuntu/) - [Windows 8 Media Center - Free till January ](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-media-center-free-january/) - [Windows 8 - Media Center](https://jimiz.net/windows-8-media-center/) - [Screenshot software - Jing Alternative](https://jimiz.net/screenshot-software-jing-alternative/) - [Magento - Google Analytics](https://jimiz.net/magento-google-analytics/) - [Airport extreme export key - equivalent network password](https://jimiz.net/airport-extreme-export-key-equivalent-network-password/) - [Mobile Web Testing](https://jimiz.net/mobile-web-testing/) - [ThinkPad Turns 20: Thank you IBM ](https://jimiz.net/thinkpad-turns-20-ibm/) - [Unwanted Software and Toolbars - no Thank you](https://jimiz.net/unwanted-software-toolbars/) - [Commuter Panniers](https://jimiz.net/commuter-panniers/) - [News, newspapers, information and how you get it.](https://jimiz.net/news-newspapers-information/) - [Mobile First - Responsive Design](https://jimiz.net/mobile-responsive-design/) --- # # Detailed Content ## Pages - Published: 2021-08-11 - Modified: 2021-08-11 - URL: https://jimiz.net/wordpress-management-tools/ There are many tools to allow you to manage WordPress. I have found that two tools are at the top of my list. MainWP (https://mainwp. com) and WPMuDev (https://wpmudev. com/) MainWP Main WP is self-hosted and you install it onto a server you have access. Overall it can be Free and provides a lot of functionality. If you want more features (I would suggest this) You can purchase a LifeTime subscription. This is a great tool. WPMUDev WPMUDev is a subscription per site or for a larger agency fee. They provide custom plugins that are amazing. WP SMUSH is one that you probably have heard of. I really enjoy this tool and the way it allows you to manage a site. It may be expensive but worth the purchase. WordPress Management allows you to maintain a WordPress site or sites from this tool. Backup, Updates, Plugins, and more. --- - Published: 2020-01-09 - Modified: 2020-01-09 - URL: https://jimiz.net/privacy-policy/ Who we are Our website address is: https://jimiz. net. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic. com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. Media If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. Contact forms If you fill out our contact form we ask for Name, email, and some type of comment. This information is collected and sent via email to notify us. We will not sell or share this information. Cookies If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year. If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies.... --- - Published: 2018-02-12 - Modified: 2020-01-20 - URL: https://jimiz.net/ Blog Blog posts and ramblings to chronicle my adventures in life. This may contain technology, family, business or products that I enjoy. Start Reading About Hi, I’m Jim. A father, husband, business owner, entrepreneur, and a person who loves technology. I semi-often update this blog. Learn More Contact Feel free to reach out to me with questions, contact, business ideas, projects or just a random Hello. Located in the Mitten state. Get In Touch Recent Posts Self-Hosting, Claude Code, and Fixing My Doorbell in 10 Minutes 3/14/2026 I’ve written before about how much I enjoy self-hosting services at home. If you’re curious, here’s my earlier post where I walk through some of the things I run locally: https://jimiz. net/selfhosting/ Since then... the list has only grown. Recently, as I’ve been experimenting more with AI tools — especially Claude and Claude Code — I realized something was missing from my setup. I wanted a local Git service that I could use internally instead of relying on GitHub. Two reasons pushed me in this direction: Keeping my Docker and infrastructure configs versioned locally Supporting some experimentation with tools like OpenClaw (more... Read More N8N Self-Hosting with SearXNG 9/30/20259/30/2025 I have updated my N8N Self-Hosted Docker compose library to include SearXNG . SearXNG is an internet metasearch engine that aggregates results from up to 246 search services. It is privacy focused and does not track or share data. This is an excellent addition to N8N when coupled with Local AI. You get enhanced... --- - Published: 2013-09-08 - Modified: 2013-09-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/newsletter/ Signup for my semi frequent, but always enjoyable newsletter. I decided to start sending this out because friends would ask me to resend emails with some crazy link I had forwarded, and I am always saving things to Pocket but never going back to view them. By creating a newsletter I can write less than a blog post but send out some good / fun information. Signup below. It's free and worth more than what you paid for it. Enter your email addresspowered by TinyLetter --- - Published: 2012-08-13 - Modified: 2020-01-03 - URL: https://jimiz.net/contact/ If you feel like dropping me a line please do so at this email hello@jimiz. net Located in the Mitten State, living in the Grand Rapids Area. --- - Published: 2011-03-07 - Modified: 2011-03-07 - URL: https://jimiz.net/calendar/ Calendar | Jimiz.net - Technology and Life Skip to content Menu Home About Blog Topics Technology Biking Mobile Security Contact Calendar Leave a CommentCommentName Email Website Search for: Recent PostsSelf-Hosting, Claude Code, and Fixing My Doorbell in 10 Minutes3/14/2026N8N Self-Hosting with SearXNG9/30/2025N8N – Self-host with Docker- Postgresql, Redis, and Caddy8/31/2025Running My AI Locally with Ollama, n8n, and Supabase8/14/2025Cloudflare makes a bold move against AI Crawlers7/2/2025 More Info Home About Contact Blog Email : [email protected] Linkedin Jimiz.net – Jim Becher If you have questions or want to reach out please contact me.   Blessed to live in the Mitten State. [email protected] Facebook Twitter Linkedin Privacy Policy 2020 Jimiz.net | Powered by: Tilde32.com --- - Published: 2010-02-22 - Modified: 2021-11-14 - URL: https://jimiz.net/about/ About Jim Hi, I’m Jim. A father, husband, business owner, entrepreneur, and a person who loves technology. I semi-often update this blog. This blog is about technical items, life, fun, activity, and soccer that I update infrequently. I would love to say that I will update this site daily but, that is just not going to happen. I am a father of 4 great kids and find myself surrounded by family and fun. Feel free to contact me with ideas, comments, thoughts or any business propositions – Contact Why have a blog I have always enjoyed sharing my experiences and especially my technical projects. You will find my posts are a collection of projects that I am working on, products that I have enjoyed (or not enjoyed) and technology in general. I attempted years ago to do some journaling, and those attempts at journaling turned into blog posts and somewhere along the line I decided a blog was a good idea. This blog has been active since Dec 15th, 2000. This little blog has gone through a lot of changes over the years. It started on an old cobalt server running chili asp. From that time it has evolved a bit, I found a screenshot from the Wayback machine from January 2002. At that time I was focused on soccer and life. As time progressed, this little blog moved on to information regarding more soccer and then kids. Now It is just a way to share part of my life.... --- - Published: 2010-02-22 - Modified: 2021-02-20 - URL: https://jimiz.net/iisreporter/ A while back I made a little . NET app that allows you to view the number of users on your IIS box. I called it IISreporter. You can read more about it and download the app at www. iisreporter. com. It is free so head on over and signup and download. It is also featured on IIS. net UPDATE: IISreporter has finally been retired. Retired meaning I somehow did not renew the domain and a wonderful Chinese company now owns it. If anyone wants the code. Let me know. --- --- ## Posts - Published: 2026-03-14 - Modified: 2026-03-14 - URL: https://jimiz.net/self-hosting-claude-code-and-fixing-my-doorbell-in-10-minutes/ I’ve written before about how much I enjoy self-hosting services at home. If you’re curious, here’s my earlier post where I walk through some of the things I run locally: https://jimiz. net/selfhosting/ Since then... the list has only grown. Recently, as I’ve been experimenting more with AI tools — especially Claude and Claude Code — I realized something was missing from my setup. I wanted a local Git service that I could use internally instead of relying on GitHub. Two reasons pushed me in this direction: Keeping my Docker and infrastructure configs versioned locally Supporting some experimentation with tools like OpenClaw (more on that later) So I decided to deploy Gitea. The Broken Doorbell Problem At our house we have a Unifi G5 Pro doorbell camera. Normally when someone rings the doorbell: Home Assistant detects the event Alexa devices announce “Someone is at the front door” Simple. Helpful. Works great. Except... it stopped working. My family noticed immediately. Apparently, the doorbell announcing visitors is considered mission-critical infrastructure in our house. The root cause turned out to be: Amazon 2FA changes Several Home Assistant updates I had missed Some stale integrations In other words... A configuration nightmare waiting to happen. How I Would Have Fixed This Before Normally I would: SSH into the server Check logs Look through configs Search forums Try fixes Break things Undo fixes Eventually get it working I actually enjoy this process. But realistically, it usually takes hours of tinkering and discovery. How I Fixed It This... --- - Published: 2025-09-30 - Modified: 2025-09-30 - URL: https://jimiz.net/n8n-self-hosting-with-searxng/ I have updated my N8N Self-Hosted Docker compose library to include SearXNG . SearXNG is an internet metasearch engine that aggregates results from up to 246 search services. It is privacy focused and does not track or share data. This is an excellent addition to N8N when coupled with Local AI. You get enhanced results by utilizing web search data with your AI workflow Here is an example Chat AI workflow with an SearXNG, It allows the agent to query data from the web to answer questions. When used SearXNG as part of a workflow, the AI agent can perform searches and look up information during the AI session. In this example, I instructed a simple AI agent to "tell me about the blog jimiz. net. " The AI agent was running Ollama locally and did not have any information in the LLM (Large Language Model) (Qwen2. 5:latest) about the website jimiz. net. Instead, it utilized SearXNG to search for and retrieve information. In the image, I share the logs showing that it queried about jimiz. net and then returned the answer. As you experiment and build more AI agents, you will begin to utilize and chain tools together. SearXNG is a powerful tool to incorporate into your solutions. In my next blog or video, I will share some of the MCP servers I utilize. Here is my self-hosted N8N Solution https://github. com/jimiz12/n8n-docker-postgresql? utm_source=chatgpt. com --- - Published: 2025-08-31 - Modified: 2025-08-31 - URL: https://jimiz.net/n8n-self-host-with-docker-postgresql-redis-and-caddy/ Self-Hosted N8N - Github Repo I recently created a Selfhosted N8N Git repository that allows me to share with my team (and use for myself) a self-hosted N8N instance. I can run it locally or in the cloud, using Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Caddy. Why n8n? n8n is an amazing tool for automation. Out of the box, it lets you: Automate workflows between services Build ETL pipelines Integrate AI into real business processes The cloud service at n8n. io is fantastic if you want quick hosting without infrastructure concerns. But for teams (like ours) who need flexibility, control, and data locality, self-hosting is the way to go. Why Self-Host n8n? Self-hosting n8n gives you: Full control over data, architecture, and cost Private integrations with internal systems behind your firewall Compliance alignment with industry and client requirements Scalability with predictable spend—no surprise usage bills Flexibility to customize: enable community nodes and MCP tools for AI workflows With Docker deployment is straightforward, and you can automate updates, add resilience, and build consistency across local and production environments. My Setup I’ve created an open-source repo that includes everything you need to spin up n8n with Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Caddy. jimiz12/n8n-docker-postgresql This setup provides: PostgreSQL for persistence Redis for queue handling Caddy for HTTPS and reverse proxy Profiles for local development vs. production Prerequisites Before you get started, make sure you have: Docker installed Docker Compose installed Git installed Local Development Spin up n8n locally in seconds: git clone https://github. com/jimiz12/n8n-docker-postgresql. git cd... --- - Published: 2025-08-14 - Modified: 2025-08-31 - URL: https://jimiz.net/local-ai-with-ollama-n8n-supabase/ For the past six months, I’ve been running my own local AI stack , and it’s been an absolute game-changer for my development workflow and automation projects. It’s all made possible thanks to the fantastic local-ai-packaged project (Thanks, Cole), which bundles everything you need to run AI models in a container-friendly way. This setup has saved me money, reduced dependency on cloud APIs, and made experimenting with AI much faster. My Setup I split my local AI environment into two main components: MacBook Pro M1: Runs my Ollama instance, leveraging the M1’s powerful GPU for inference. (Side note: I’ve been eyeing the new Apple M3 Ultra... after reading this comparison between M3 Ultra and NVIDIA RTX, I’m convinced it would be a giant leap. ) Dedicated Docker Machine: Runs n8n, Supabase, and the rest of my automation stack. This separation keeps my AI workloads snappy while letting the Docker box handle databases, triggers, and integrations. Why Local AI? Running AI locally gives me: Faster iteration: No round-trips to cloud APIs, so testing prompts or chaining models together is near-instant. Lower costs: I’ve removed a few recurring API charges. I still use cloud AI for certain tasks, but my baseline automation now runs on local compute. Privacy & control: My data never leaves my network unless I choose to send it. For development, it’s just fun. Especially when I’m prototyping new workflows in n8n. I can integrate Ollama as a local endpoint, push results into Supabase, and trigger downstream automations without... --- - Published: 2025-07-02 - Modified: 2025-07-02 - URL: https://jimiz.net/cloudflare-makes-a-bold-move-against-ai-crawlers/ AI Crawlers, Meet the Firewall: Why I’m Backing Cloudflare’s Bold Move Something pretty major just happened in the internet world, and I’ve got thoughts. On July 1st, Cloudflare announced they’re now blocking all AI crawlers by default—unless a site explicitly says, “Come on in. ” As someone who uses Cloudflare across both my personal projects and our work at Augusto, I’m giving this move a solid, two-thumbs-up, slow clap. What’s the Big Deal? Let’s break it down: right now, AI bots roam the internet like overly curious raccoons—scraping up content, training models, and sometimes spitting back that same info without ever pointing back to the source. No credit. No link. No traffic No compensation. Meanwhile, the people and teams who actually wrote the blog posts, created the tools, or built the guides? Left wondering why their traffic dropped while ChatGPT suddenly sounds suspiciously like their site. That’s the problem Cloudflare just decided to confront head-on. What Did Cloudflare Do? Cloudflare, which powers roughly 1 in 5 websites on the internet (yes, really), is now blocking AI bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and others by default on their Free, Pro, and Business plans. Want to train your next LLM? Great—go ask for permission first. Or maybe even talk about compensation. (This will be interesting) This flips the script. Instead of publishers needing to jump through hoops to opt out, AI companies now have to work to opt in. Why I’m Into This I’ve been a Cloudflare fan for years. I use it... --- - Published: 2025-06-24 - Modified: 2025-06-24 - URL: https://jimiz.net/ai-costs-tokens-and-credits/ AI Costs: Tokens, Credits, and What They Mean for you and your team AI is everywhere these days, but how much does it actually cost to use? If you’ve played with ChatGPT, Claude, or similar tools, you’ve probably seen terms like tokens and credits. Here’s a quick guide to what they mean—and how to avoid surprises on your bill. What Are Tokens? AI models don’t count words—they count tokens. A token might be a word, part of a word, or even just a character. For example, “Hello world! ” is three tokens: “Hello”, “world”, and “! ”. Both your input and the AI’s output use tokens, so longer conversations or big documents use more. What Are Credits? Credits are how you pay for AI use. Some platforms give you monthly credits, others charge by the number of tokens you use (like $0. 002 per 1,000 tokens for GPT-4. 1 input). More complex tasks—like generating images or analyzing audio—cost more credits because they use more computing power. Model Costs: Not All AI Is Priced the Same Different models have different strengths—and prices. Here’s a quick snapshot: Model Use Case Input (per 1K tokens) Output (per 1K tokens) GPT-4. 1 Advanced reasoning, LLM apps $0. 002 $0. 008 GPT-4. 1 Mini Fast, light text tasks $0. 0004 $0. 0016 Claude 3 Opus Deep comprehension, long context $0. 015 $0. 075 Claude 3 Sonnet Budget-friendly summaries $0. 003 $0. 015 Pro tip: Use lighter models for routine jobs (like parsing invoices), and save... --- - Published: 2025-05-02 - Modified: 2025-05-02 - URL: https://jimiz.net/selfhosting/ Over the past few months, I’ve been having some energizing conversations with colleagues and friends about technology trends, personal infrastructure, and the explosion of AI tools. One recent chat with my teammate stuck with me—we got into a discussion about self-hosting, and it made me pause and reflect. It turns out, I’ve been self-hosting software at home for over 20 years. What started with a bulky server humming in the corner has evolved into something far more compact and elegant. Today, my entire setup runs on a small Intel NUC and a NAS, both quietly sitting on a shelf. Despite the size change, the number of services I run has only grown. From Racks to Raspberry Pis In the early 2000s, self-hosting meant hours of tinkering, huge hardware, and living with the constant hum of fans and spinning disks. But over time, cloud-native apps and tools like Docker changed everything. Now I can spin up a new app in seconds, isolate it from the rest of my environment, and tear it down just as easily. Recently, I ran a quick script to export a list of all the Docker containers I’m currently running—and wow, it’s grown! I realized just how central self-hosting has become in managing both my personal productivity and home automation. LIST OF ALL OF MY DOCKER CONTAINERS: https://a. ugus. to/selfhostjim Tools I Can’t Live Without Here are a few of the services I self-host today that I consider absolutely essential: 1. Habit Tracker Staying consistent is everything.... --- - Published: 2025-03-29 - Modified: 2025-04-01 - URL: https://jimiz.net/building-a-weather-app-with-4-ai-dev-tools-a-hands-on-comparison/ AI-powered development tools are helping change and shape the software development ecosystem. From writing code to designing interfaces, these tools make software creation faster, more accessible, and often more fun. To explore this shift, I decided to build the same simple application—a weather app—using four emerging AI development platforms: Replit AI Bold. new Loveable. dev V0. dev Each tool takes a slightly different approach to AI-assisted development, but by using the same use case across all of them, I got a clearer sense of what each one offers, where it shines, and where it still needs work. Why AI Dev Tools Matter Before diving into the comparisons, let’s talk about the "why. " Traditional software development requires deep technical knowledge and time-consuming tasks like boilerplate coding, debugging, and documentation. AI development tools promise to: Accelerate development by generating code from simple prompts or UI sketches. Lower the barrier to entry for non-engineers or less technical team members. Free up developers to focus on problem-solving and creativity. Support rapid prototyping for startups and internal tools alike. This evolution doesn’t replace developers—it enhances them. Example App: A weather APP To help evaluate these tools, I decided to use a simple weather app that takes an input of Name and Zip code. The App utilized a third-party API (OpenWeather API) to help showcase how these tools can interface with other systems. I also asked the system to try to capture the user's location from the browser or their mobile device. Outcome and results... --- - Published: 2025-03-05 - Modified: 2025-03-05 - URL: https://jimiz.net/how-i-use-n8n-for-business-and-personal-automation/ I've been using n8n for over three years, and it has become an essential tool for both my work and personal life. Whether it's automating business workflows or managing my daily tasks, n8n has been my go-to solution for seamless automation. I am always amazed at what can be done with n8n. I would say this is one of the most valuable tools I have used. Automating Business Workflows At work, n8n plays a critical role in handling various automation needs, including: Finance & Budgeting – Automating time tracking, budget updates, and financial reporting. Operations & Reporting – Streamlining operational processes and generating automated reports. API Integrations – Connecting different services and ensuring smooth data flow across platforms. ETL & Data Processing – Extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data for analytics and decision-making. These automations save time, reduce errors, and improve efficiency, making n8n an invaluable asset to our business operations. Personal Use: Organizing My Day & AI Workflows Beyond work, I use n8n to automate various personal tasks: Daily Summaries & Task Management – Automatically compile emails with important updates and reminders. Weather Forecasts – I get daily weather reports sent directly to me. I also have weather and water temperature apps that I call from telegram or text to give me the water temperature in Holland and send me an image. (see image) Local AI & LLM Processes – Running automation for my self-hosted AI models and local LLMs. Alexa app: I have an Alexa app that uses... --- - Published: 2025-03-02 - Modified: 2025-03-02 - URL: https://jimiz.net/why-im-all-in-on-cloudflare-and-you-should-be-too/ I know firsthand the importance of security, speed, and reliability when managing online services—whether it's websites, applications, or home and business security. That’s why Cloudflare is an essential part of my toolkit. From domain registration to security and performance optimization, Cloudflare provides everything I need to keep my projects running smoothly and securely. I’ve been using Cloudflare for both personal and professional needs, and it has never let me down. There’s so much to share about Cloudflare that it’s impossible to cover it all in just one blog post. Why Cloudflare? Cloudflare isn’t just a CDN (Content Delivery Network) —it’s an all-in-one powerhouse for internet security, performance, and reliability. Here’s why I rely on it every day: Services I Use: Domain Registry Cloudflare’s domain registration offers an excellent registration tool and great pricing—no hidden fees, just straightforward value. DNS Services Lightning-fast DNS resolution keeps my domains always reachable. DNSSEC protection shields against spoofing and hijacking attempts. DNS proxy and dynamic DNS are great features. SSL Automatic SSL/TLS encryption ensures secure connections across my websites. One-click certificate management makes securing domains effortless. Analytics Real-time insights give me a clear picture of traffic and performance. Security (Proxy) Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) stops threats before they can cause harm. DDoS protection at all layers ensures my sites stay online, even during attacks. The Zero Trust security model strengthens access control and user authentication. Tunnels Cloudflare Tunnels provide secure, private access to my services—no public exposure needed. This is such a powerful tool.... --- - Published: 2025-02-24 - Modified: 2025-02-24 - URL: https://jimiz.net/running-an-ai-llm-locally-testing-out-deepseek/ I have been working and experimenting with AI in all diffrerent aspects of my life. I have changed the way I work with AI around stratagey and busienss. However one of the benefits of being in technology is both using the technology and teaching others about the technology. Many people I have talked with lately are asking questions about deepseek. They have heard about it on th enews and ask what is it. When talking to people I also mention that I have been running my AI models locally. This has really allowed me to fine tune, train, and also experiment with AI. So, I did a quick video to show how someone could use DeepSeek locally. In this video I am running ollama and DeepSeek on a macbook and it allows me to keep all of my prompts and data local. I have been working with AI in various aspects of my life, experimenting with different applications. I’ve changed the way I approach AI in strategy and business. One of the advantages of being in the technology field is not only using the technology but also teaching others about it. Recently, many people I’ve spoken with have been asking about DeepSeek. They’ve heard about it in the news and want to know more about what it is. When discussing this, I also mention that I’ve been running my AI models locally. This approach has allowed me to fine-tune, train, and experiment with AI more effectively. To share my knowledge,... --- - Published: 2025-02-24 - Modified: 2025-02-24 - URL: https://jimiz.net/macbook-upgrade-and-challenges/ I recently updated my main computer, a MacBook Pro, to a more current version. I appreciate how easy Apple makes the migration process. You reset the Mac, and then you migrate from one Mac to another. The entire process of migrating from my old Mac to the new one took four hours, which included updating macOS on the new Mac. Once the transfer was complete, I encountered some challenges customizing my Mac. Here are the items I’m documenting for future reference: 1. Mac Magic Keyboard: It wouldn’t connect to my new Mac. There were two reasons why Bluetooth wouldn’t connect: (1) it was connected to another Mac, and (2) I couldn’t get the keyboard into pairing mode. Thankfully, YouTube provided a quick solution. 2. Installing Licenses: I had to install licenses for my favorite tools, including CleanShot, Clean My Mac, and Dropbox. 3. Installing Homebrew: Since I moved from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac, I had to remove the Intel version and install the new version. You can find the installation instructions at https://brew. sh/. 4. Reinstalling Apps: I had to remove and reinstall the Apple Silicon versions of apps like Brave Browser, Docker, Visual Studio Code, and a few others. 5. Reinstalling Dev Tools: I also had to reinstall development tools such as Python and Node. js. Overall, this process was completed in less than a day, and I was productive without many of the above apps. In the past, computer migrations would cause a few... --- - Published: 2025-02-11 - Modified: 2025-02-11 - URL: https://jimiz.net/long-overdue-update-2025/ I won’t even check the date of my last blog post because, honestly, I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. Let’s just say it’s been a while. But instead of dwelling on that, let me jump right into what I’ve been up to and where I’m headed. Family & Focus First and foremost, my family is doing well, and they remain my number one priority. Everything else comes second to them. On the career side, my focus is on Augusto Digital, the company I co-founded with two close friends. It’s been an incredible journey building something meaningful with people I trust and respect. Passion for Soccer & Technology Some things never change—my love for soccer and technology is as strong as ever. Soccer is more than just a game for me. It’s my stress relief, my mental health reset, and a way to keep both my mind and body in sync. No matter how busy life gets, I make time for it. Then there’s technology, which never fails to excite me. It’s constantly evolving, and I love staying ahead of the curve. What I’ve Been Working On I’ve been keeping busy both professionally and personally, diving into: Technology I’m Working On Self-Hosting & Open Source – I’ve been a fan of self-hosting for a long time, running multiple systems and technologies locally. This passion for open-source tools has not only benefited my personal projects but has also shaped how we work at Augusto Digital. Tools like Docker,... --- - Published: 2023-03-02 - Modified: 2023-03-02 - URL: https://jimiz.net/fever-vs-wings-wnba-showdown-ignites-as-clark-boston-battle-howard-in-playoff-push/ The Indiana Fever and Dallas Wings collide tonight in a pivotal WNBA matchup that carries major playoff implications and showcases some of the league's brightest stars. Fans searching "fever game today" and "where to watch indiana fever vs dallas wings" are gearing up for an electrifying contest between two teams trending in opposite directions. This fever vs wings clash promises high-octane action, individual brilliance, and intense postseason urgency.   Stakes: Playoff Positioning and Momentum Indiana Fever: Riding a wave of energy generated by rookie phenom Caitlin Clark, the Fever are fighting to solidify their position in the playoff race. Every game is crucial as they aim to return to the postseason after a multi-year absence. A win against a fellow contender like the Wings would be a massive statement. Dallas Wings: The Wings are firmly in the playoff hunt but need consistency. Led by veteran Natasha Howard and a balanced attack, they're looking to climb the standings and secure home-court advantage in the first round. This wings vs fever game is a chance to gain ground and build momentum.   The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon: Fever's Engine All eyes will be on Caitlin Clark. The rookie sensation has single-handedly revitalized the Indiana Fever, bringing unprecedented attention and excitement to the franchise. Her scoring prowess, court vision, and clutch gene make her must-watch TV every night. Defenses game-plan relentlessly to stop her, but Clark continues to find ways to impact the game. Her matchup against the Wings' perimeter defenders will be a... --- - Published: 2021-11-06 - Modified: 2021-11-15 - URL: https://jimiz.net/python-3-on-macos/ Python 3 on MacOS I recently had the need to create a small python script to run a process. I quickly looked up a process I could utilize to read a Rest API then do some work based on that content. I fired up Visual Studio code and wrote out the framework of the program I needed in about 10 min. (NOTE: I have not used Python in a long time and it was fun to quickly put something together). Once I was done writing the code I jumped into a term terminal and ran the program "python GetAPIData. py". It worked well - opened a file of records added to an array and displayed the line items and did a count. I then added some code that referenced how to call an API and it used the "requests", knowing I needed to run "pip install requests" before I ran the program, I was rewarded with an error. zsh: command not found: pipRead more --- - Published: 2021-08-06 - Modified: 2021-08-06 - URL: https://jimiz.net/how-to-find-your-wifi-password-on-a-mac/ I recently had an issue where I wanted to re-broadcast a wifi network using my own router. This allowed me to use an existing wifi network that I had a password for a few years ago and my MAC remembered it automatically. The location I was at - my remote office did not have a great connection to the wifi signal and it would cut out occasionally. So I wanted to add a device between my location and the main access point. I will share that process in another post. (Using a WiFi router to repeat a WiFi signal - Turris). To make all of this happen I needed to obtain the existing wifi password. My computer remembered it and could share it to my iPhone however I did not have it written down. It just happens that you can view the wireless network password on your Mac if you know the process. Find your Wifi Password on a Mac The first step is to open the Keychain Access Application to do this use the finder (the magnifying glass on the top of the screen). Once you open finder search for "Keychain Access" This will open the keychain app. Once you have the keychain application open you can search for your wifi network name. In my example, I would have typed in "sourcewifi" which is the wifi network name (SSID) that I cannot remember the password for. This will allow you to see the name of your wifi network (Note:... --- - Published: 2021-04-05 - Modified: 2021-04-05 - URL: https://jimiz.net/nft-craziness-what-is-an-nft/ The Crypto world has changed a lot in the last few years. One new and upcoming topic is NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens). In the last few weeks, we have seen a significant increase in the volume of NFT purchases. If you follow cryptocurrency you have probably heard about NFT's in the news. I'd like to take a few minutes to share some information on NFT's as well as my experience purchasing a few Tokens as well as items with NFT. What is an NFT NFT's are based on a crypto backend. The best definition I have seen was from an article in "The Hustle" website - https://thehustle. co/why-nfts-are-suddenly-selling-for-millions-of-dollars/. In a nutshell “Non-fungible” means that an item is unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a 5 dollar bill is fungible (what a fun word), Trade one $5 bill with another and you have the exact same thing. A piece of artwork however is non-fungible it is unique. If you traded your work of art for another you would get something completely different. Why would I want an NFT? NFT's are all about ownership. An NFT can be certified on a blockchain to prove ownership. Currently, the market is flooded with collectibles, art, and other media. Recently the artist Beeple sold his NFT for 69 Million. In addition to collectibles games and apps can also utilize NFT's. Issues with NFT As with any technology, there are issues. Currently, with some NFT's on the Etherum blockchain, there is an issue... --- - Published: 2020-04-14 - Modified: 2020-04-15 - URL: https://jimiz.net/working-from-home-suggestions-comfort/ I started my journey working from home about a year ago. Our company has been 100% remote for the last 4 years, and the team has built up a great process to be able to efficiently working from home. During this COVID-19 Pandemic, I have read a lot of really good Work From Home (WFH) articles. This quick post will be my attempt at a different take at a WFH information post. WFH Comfort I am writing this document to focus on comfort while working from home. There are many ways a person can define comfort but I will do my best to explain my view. Since I started working from home I have selected a few items to make my working from home experience more comfortable. Some of the items I will list are my personal preference and I also rank some items greater in importance than others. A good chair Standup desk A nice pair of shoes A good set of pants Heater / fan Comfortable Chair The first item my team recommended to me when I moved from an office environment to working from home was to purchase a good chair. I started my WFH experience with the following chair from Amazon (Amazon Basics Mid-Back Desk Office Chair ). I quickly realized after sitting for long periods this is not the best chair for me. The amazon chair is great for visitors however, I should have listened to my co-founders and purchased a better chair. I have... --- - Published: 2020-04-04 - Modified: 2020-04-04 - URL: https://jimiz.net/opera-browser-daily-driver-for-3-years/ I just realized I have been using Opera as my main browser for over 3 years. Somehow in 2017, I decided that I should give Opera a try. If you are not familiar with Opera, it is a browser similar to chrome or firefox. In fact, Opera is built on chromium the underlying components of the chrome browser. Opera is by no means the top-ranking browser, but I have been a loyal user as they have progressed with features and updates. I originally switched to Opera because chrome was using way too much memory on my laptop, and Opera had just introduced a VPN right in the browser. Over the years I have tried to switch to Firefox or Chrome, but always end up using Opera. Opera is not without challenges. However, these issues are pretty easy to get used to or overcome. Challenges Extensions - Initially, when I started with Opera there were a few key browser extensions that were not available. I quickly found that there was an Opera Extension that allowed you to install chrome extensions - https://addons. opera. com/en/extensions/details/install-chrome-extensions/. This allowed me to install extensions that did not exist for Opera Browser Compatibility - Even though Opera is built on the chromium engine it is still sometimes flagged as an unsupported browser. Most notably a few of the sites that I use for administration (Unifi Management) and an online banking site I used to use. You can get around this by changing your User agent for... --- - Published: 2020-03-13 - Modified: 2020-03-13 - URL: https://jimiz.net/amazfit-bip-s/ I have been extremely happy with my Xiaomi Amazfit Bip smartwatch. It has been over 2 years since I discovered and purchased this inexpensive smartwatch. The key item that caused me to purchase this watch was the 30-day battery. However, I have determined that what I love the most is the alarm. Because I wear the watch to sleep, the silent vibrating alarm is perfect for me (No alarm clock to wake up the wife). This watch has proven to be more durable than I had expected. I keep this watch on all the time, even though the original version is rated IP 68 (only resistant to dust, rain and splashing). Over the summer I wear the Bip while swimming in the Lake and it continues to hold up. Amazfit has tried to offer a new version of this watch recently called the Amazfit Bip Lite. After looking at the Bip Lite options this watch appears to be the same as the original without the GPS. This new Lite version did not actually give me any reason to purchase. However, at CES 2020 Amazfit announced a new version of the Bip, the Bip S. (https://en. amazfit. com/bip-s. html). Amazifit Bip S appears to have the following updates (and probably some more I did not list) Increated battery life when using GPS 40 Day battery Better color graphics Improved processor Music controls 5 ATM Water Resistance (you can wear it swimming) Amazafit has finally provided enough features and enhancements to motivate... --- - Published: 2020-01-25 - Modified: 2020-01-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/xfinity-injecting-a-message-in-my-browser/ I recently received this message in my browser while opening a web page I designed for a friends company. I have received this message before while going to other sites, and just refreshed the browser and continued, not thinking anything of it. "There is an issue with your connection - We had an issue while attempting to notify you about your Xfinity Internet service". My first reaction was anger. Anger because Xfinity injected a message into my browser, Anger that Xfinity has the ability to inject or add to my data connection. After receiving this I did as all good technology-loving user would do, I Googled it. Based on my findings this is something that Xfinity does when trying to notify their subscribers that we are using too much bandwidth and getting near the data cap. To be clear, I am getting near my data cap and actually just went over it for the 3rd time. "Side note - Xfinity gives you 2 free months that you can go over your cap". I find this method of notification disturbing for two reasons: 1. They are injecting something into my data. 2. There are other ways to communicate with me Xfinity Injecting into my data This is just wrong if Xfinity can inject a message what else are they adding? Are they adding client or javascript trackers? Are they adding a small pixel that can see what data I am looking at? I could be wrong, but isn't this a form... --- - Published: 2020-01-03 - Modified: 2020-01-19 - URL: https://jimiz.net/blog-update/ 2020 Blog Refresh It is a new year and my blog needed some updates. Not just small updates but some real technology love. The theme was not complliant with the new version of WordPress, I had 4 plugins that were throwing exceptions (filling the log), 2 plugins that were no longer supported, the SSL for the site was no-longer working, and I had forgot the secure admin page to even log in. Overall, my blog was a mess. New Theme I decided it was time to retire my old theme and look for a new solution. After a little research I ended up selecting GeneratePress . Generate Press Pro has a very lightweight layout that is focused on performance. If you are in the market for a modular and lightweight theme I would recommend GeneratePress. The migration from the old theme to GeneratePress was pretty straightforward. The only issues I encountered were because of some poor technical choices I had made in the past with modifying functions. php.   Hopefully everyone will enjoy the new layout and design. WordPress Plugin Bloat Before the migration to the new theme, I had over 50 plugins. That is way too many plugins to allow for a performant site. Somewhere along the line, I must have taken the approach that more is better. As I mentioned earlier, some were no longer working and others were no longer supported. It was a rewarding experience to start tearing out all these plugins. I took the opportunity... --- - Published: 2018-08-25 - Modified: 2020-01-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/amazfit-bip-review/ Amazfit Bip Review (used in real life) Earlier this year I purchased a Xiaomi MiBand 2 for myself and my wife. I had been looking for a fitnesss watch and someone at work showed me their miBand. If you have never heard of this device you are not alone. Xiaomi is great smart phone maker out of China. They have also created a few other devices like the MiBand. This artcile is not on the MiBand 2 but I do plan on posting regarding that as well. I loved the MiBand so much and through a little research discovered the Xiaomi also had a few other watches that they created with another company Huami. This lead me to discover the Amazfit Bip Smartwatch. Purchase on Amazon This watch in my opinion is a great balance of design and price. I'll go into more of my review, but for those who are impatient here is my overall reaction. PROS Great Price (Less than $80 when in purchased on Amazon) Fantastic Battery life (45 days on standby) - I get normal 25 plus days GPS Most activity tracker features Alarm (vibrate) CONS Limited integration to other apps Graphics are so-so (not as crisp as AppleWatch) The App (MiFit) could be improved Accuracy of steps (in comparison to other fitness trackers) Bip Review For the cost this little watch is good looking and very functional. I have had multipe people think I was wearing an apple watch, only to learn later when I... --- - Published: 2017-02-25 - Modified: 2017-02-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/replace-windows-media-center-kodi-sad-day/ Replace Windows Media Center with Kodi I have finally replaced my windows media center system with Kodi. I have posted in the past about windows media center and how I use it for a DVR and Live TV. I finally had to say goodbye to that setup, it was time. Windows 8 kept prompting me to upgrade, the system kept having issues and mostly I'm ready to cut the cord. Setup for Live TV and Kodi To make my system work I have re-used all the existing hardware. Here is the cut list below: Window 10 x64 Lenovo T410 - i7 and 8 Gig Ram 2 hard drives 1-200GB SSD 2-500 GB 7400rpm SiliconDust HD Homerun Prime Plex Tv Kodi HDHomeRun Live TV Windows Media center remote Launcher4kodi - Auto start kodi MCE Buddy - Great app - Remove Commercials (Give them a donation) AmazonBasics Ultra Thin Indoor TV Antenna - 50 Mile Range The above items were already working with Windows Media Center. I even tried the Windows 10 (Windows Media Center - setup) However it did not seem to work. Overall this setup is working well. Things to take note of. My kids really like the plex interface and are learning to get used to Kodi. The Kodi world of add-ons and "best add-ons" is a little of a grey area. There are a lot of somewhat illegal sites and areas to get content. I still use a mix of Cable (cable card) and antenna - almost cord... --- - Published: 2017-02-25 - Modified: 2017-02-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/iis-server-headers-clickjacking-xframeoptions/ Configure IIS to use - X-Frame-Options I recently had a request to update a server to correct a few audit findings. One finding was related to "clickjacking" (More info from Wikipedia and OWASP) Clickjacking is a process where a malicious link is injected on the page that takes you to what you would think is a normal page but is hijacking your browser. In reading the finding and the OWASP write-up the best course of action for an IIS server was to utilize the X-Frame-Options. The X-frame-options concept came into play during the time of IE-8. The Microsoft team has a nice write up - https://blogs. msdn. microsoft. com/ieinternals/2010/03/30/combating-clickjacking-with-x-frame-options/ This was then introduced as a standard in 2013 (take note some browsers do not have full capability with a particular setting) IIS Settings - Clickjacking To correct the audit finding, I took advantage of using the IIS header configurations https://developer. mozilla. org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Frame-Options. You can modify these directly in your (web. config) for IIS, this is located in the root of the site. This can be added in your existing tag. Or the easier method, that I ended up using was to change this directly in IIS manager. There is the ability to update the Header right through the GUI. Select the HTTP Repsponse Headers and select the Add link. Create a name "X-Frame-Options" and add a value of "SAMEORIGIN" When you edit this in IIS Manager it will add the elements to the "Web. config" in the root of your... --- - Published: 2016-09-28 - Modified: 2016-09-28 - URL: https://jimiz.net/pptp-vpn-macos-sierra-missing/ My title may be a little misleading. After updating my Mac to the new macOS Sierra I realized that my favorite security tool pptp vpn was removed. You can read about it here on apple's support site - https://support. apple. com/en-us/HT206844 I realize that the pptp vpn protocol has been called out with limited security https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Point-to-Point_Tunneling_Protocol and is often pointed as not being secure, but this was a fairly quick and simple secure vpn. I have written many blog posts over the years on how to setup a VPN. (https://jimiz. net/tag/vpn/). It is great to see companies starting to take security serious, but I am sad to see PPTP go. If you are at loss for what to use I recommend either L2TP or openVPN (Often done with SSL). Quick lesson learned for me, 1) look before you upgrade, since I use PPTP a lot. 2) update my VPN to start using openvpn and L2TP. Side note: I have both OPENvpn and L2TP vpn available to me, I just tend to fall back to PPTP. --- - Published: 2016-06-04 - Modified: 2016-06-04 - URL: https://jimiz.net/bolt-cms-great-simple-cms-engine-review/ Bolt CMS Discovery I recently had a need to setup a site with a content management system. In the past I would just use Wordpress. However, recently it seems that WordPress has become more overhead than needed. Don't get me wrong I love WordPress, and all the features it provides like woocommerce, SEO, and every other plugin. In this particular case I needed an easy to use CMS that a non technical person could create pages and edit content. After a little research I came across Bolt CMS . A quick google search for reviews and a look at their documentation I was set to give it a try. Not to mention that they have IRC, forums and Slack channel available for help. Bolt CMS first impressions The first thing that I noticed was the install page had a few options from command line to ftp (sFTP - thank you for the secure overview). Not to mention their documentation was easy to use and easy to find content. Install was easy, however my host system did not have PHP 5. 5. After a quick upgrade to PHP 5. 5 I was ready to go. The actual install took about 5 min, thank you bolt team. I was all set to use mysql and even had a DB created. Once I ran the web configuration after the install I decided to stay with the sqllite option. So far I am very impressed, not to mention for testing purposed I copied the... --- - Published: 2016-02-07 - Modified: 2016-02-07 - URL: https://jimiz.net/magento-patch-7405-broken-image-image-upload/ Magento Images Broken after Upload I recently updated a few sites using Magento with the new security patch 7405 (note that link is for the patch info - not a download - more on that later). After the update any images uploaded or added resulted in a broken image link. I was able to troubleshoot and while looking on the server, the uploaded images were in the proper directory, however they were still not showing on the site. After finding the images, I started to troubleshoot the permissions. It appears that they were set at a 640 level and not readable by anyone. The 640 permissions (rw-r-----) equate to the owner having read and write permissions, the group has read permissions, and all other user have no rights to the file. This was in interesting find, as any image uploaded through the admin we would want at least readable. I changed the permissions of the image to 644 - (rw-r--r--) The owner will have read and write for the file, while all others may only read the file. You can see an example of a image previously uploaded and one uploaded with the permissions after the patch (good - selby_feature. jpg, not working - website1_1. jpg) chmod 644 somefile. jpg Magento Patch Permission Changes From this error I started doing some investigation it appears that others are having this issue. It was referenced on a few posts. https://community. magento. com/t5/Security-Patches/after-installing-SUPEE-7405-can-no-longer-add-or-change-images/td-p/26785/page/3 There are a few good discussions on the best way... --- - Published: 2015-12-20 - Modified: 2015-12-20 - URL: https://jimiz.net/dynamic-dns-dyndns-alternatives/ Dynamic DNS for Custom Domains I have been using dynamic dns for many years. My preferred provider was always dyndns. org. In early 2014 Dyndns (or Dyn. com) stopped offering a free Dynamic Dns solution. You can read about their decision to stop providing this service (here). NOTE: I don't disagree with their decision, at one point I even used Dyndns as a paying customer for their other services. Alternatives for DynDns. org Now that one of the best provider (well best known) is no longer many people were looking for alternatives. If you use any modern router, there is most likely a dynamic DNS area where you can select from a dropdown of providers. The image attached is form PFSense 2. 5. As you can see there are many providers available. Since 2014 I have tried many of these. I have had some success and found great features in many of these providers. Even one open sourced crowd developed one that I found on hacker news. In the end I have moved on to using two providers; HE. net and CloudFlare. Solutions - Dynamic DNS Both HE. net (dns. he. net) and CloudFlare offer a reliable Dynamic Updatable DNS solution. If you do a quick search you will notice that CloudFlare really does not offer a dynamic dns service out of the box, but many firewalls utilize their api for this feature. I have settled on a mix of these providers based on how I use Dynamic DNS. For... --- - Published: 2015-05-17 - Modified: 2015-05-17 - URL: https://jimiz.net/magento-patch-supee5994-pear-error/ There have been a series of Security issues recently. The major systems that power the web Magento and Wordpress have had critical vulnerabilities (wordpress) (magento). I won't go into the details of both, but the important part is that you need to patch your systems. In particular Magento had 3 patches that need to be added to your system. One covers the shoplift vulnerability and the others are necessary to keep a secure site. You can obtain the patches here under the Patches section. SUPEE-5994 - PEAR ERROR I ran into an issue with the SUPEE-5994 Patch when installing on both a 1. 9 and 1. 7 system. I wanted to share for those who may have the same challenges. Here is the error I received. ERROR: Patch can't be applied/reverted successfully. can't find file to patch at input line 347 Perhaps you used the wrong -p or --strip option? The text leading up to this was: -------------------------- |diff --git lib/PEAR/PEAR/PEAR. php lib/PEAR/PEAR/PEAR. php |index b4633bf. . e6f8edc 100644 |--- lib/PEAR/PEAR/PEAR. php |+++ lib/PEAR/PEAR/PEAR. php -------------------------- Research Magento 5994 PEAR Error After a bit of research I found that the issue was related to the PEAR folder not being present on all of the sites having issues. I have not looked at why some of the Magento installs don't have this folder /lib/PEAR, I will have to investigate a bit more. Image of files missing from /lib Files Missing for /Lib folder Solution To solve this error I was able... --- - Published: 2015-03-21 - Modified: 2015-03-21 - URL: https://jimiz.net/secure-home-network-kids-safe-browsing/ Secure Your Network for Kids I have 4 children and often have family over to our home. At any given time there are around 30 plus devices on our network. My wife and I have talked to our children about safe usage of the web but I am just as concerned of malicious websites and adware as I am of my children going to inappropriate sites. To help combat these items I have worked hard to combine a few technologies to make our home network safe (NOTE: as with any network keeping it safe is relative and hard work there are always items that will not get caught) Tools to secure home network I have posted before about my home network but will walk through all the tools I use to secure my family from the web. Password Protect Wifi The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a password on your wireless network. This means that anyone connecting to your wifi needs to enter a password. When selecting a security type choose WPA2 and do NOT use WEP. If you want some overview of this check out google's recommendation Online Tools to secure our network and devices If you are not using a firewall / router like ipfire you can get some great filtering with openDNS. I use opendns as the main dns settings. This free or paid service can be configured on almost any router. OpenDns - This online tool will allow you to... --- - Published: 2015-03-08 - Modified: 2015-03-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/wifi-car-dvds-spring-break-tech/ I love technology and I love my family. However these two have collided and we have had some challenges. One of those challenges relates to cords; yes I mean power cords. Some years ago I purchased a few portable DVD players. These great little items allowed my children to watch movies while we traveled. My parents and family live more than 1. 5 hours away, when we are going on trips greater than an hour the kids are allowed to watch a movie. This lead to the following setup for our last spring break trip. 4 ea Portable DVD Players (~ $80 ea) 4 ea Headphones (~$8 ea. total of 6 - we broke 2 on the way) 16 DVD's and cases ( Let's just guess at $100 over time) 2 ea - DC Y adaptors ( ~$15) This configuration worked well when we had 2 kids, I now have 4 children and well... It stunk. First we had a bag of dvd's that ended up all over our mini van and they got scratched. The cords, well they were the killer. First the kids tripped on them then they got tangled, after that they broke a power supply cord for one of the DVD players, next the headphones busted because of a tangled cord. By the end of the trip I was spending more time cleaning up DVD's, rewiring cords, and putting players away then I was eating or fueling the van. Not to mention I had about $530... --- - Published: 2014-12-14 - Modified: 2014-12-14 - URL: https://jimiz.net/lenovo-ix2dl-nas-home-backup/ Home Backup History Every year I spend the holidays making sure that our home computers and items are backed up. I have a mixture of systems and media that need to be backed up. For the past few years I have used a combination of external drives and computers to create a robust backup and storage system. This year when people were out shopping for Black Friday I purchased a Lenovo Iomega IX2-DL NAS (Network Attached Storage) online. I originally was looking for a synology 2bay system but decided to look at alternatives. Lenovo ix2-dl NAS First Impressions I was able to find a new Lenovo Iomega IX2-DL that also came with 2 Segate 2TB ST2000DM001 drives. I typically purchase things like this on NewEgg or TigerDirect but I was able to find a retailer on ebay with a new in box system and New drives. Once the system arrived I immediately plugged in the drives. The case is sturdy and the front comes off by sliding the plastic face-plate up. One thing I did notice there was not much of any documentation available with the packaging. TIP1: If you are looking for more documentation and information on this system use this url http://support. lenovoemc. com After wiring the Lenovo Iomega IX2-DL into my Gigabit switch it was connected to the network I downloaded the Manager software, but after install it was unable to find the system on my network. I quickly used DHCP manager from my firewall and was... --- - Published: 2014-11-28 - Modified: 2014-12-04 - URL: https://jimiz.net/ipfire-pfsense-firewall-review/ I have posted in the past about all the great things you can do with DDWRT or with PFsense. After a few years with PFsense I have changed to iPfire. If you have not heard of iPfire I would suggest reading about this awesome firewall platform. The main focus of iPfire is for Security. This is my simple review of the two systems HARDWARE The hardware for my firewall is a small ASUS dual core Intel Atom computer. It is configured with 2 gigs of RAM and a 64gig SSD drive. Both firewall versions ran very well on this platform. From a hardware perspective it is probably an overkill for a router but you never know. Here is a quick view of "top" from my ipfire firewall - Note that squid and snort are only using about 9%. This is a reason that I enjoy iPfire vs other platforms. PFsense vs IPfire As for a comparison of PFsense vs ipfire it has been interesting. Overall I prefer ipfire, but pfsense has a lot of good features: User Interface: IpFire is the winner. The GUI is both easy to use and intuitive. PFsense has everything but can sometimes be confusing with the vast options. The UI for reporting in iPfire has been pretty good. There are a lot of options but once you get comfortable you can get great overview and detailed information. Performance: I think this is a tie in overall usage performance. For what we do at my house,... --- - Published: 2014-11-28 - Modified: 2014-11-28 - URL: https://jimiz.net/ipfire-clamav-customization/ I have been very happy with my current Firewall setup of iPfire (ipfire. org). The system has done a great job of performance and security. I use many features from Squid, Snort, openVpn, and others. I even tried the TOR proxy routing. This weekend with lots of family over for Thanks Giving it was great to watch the proxy reports and see savings on bandwidth and show performance. Setup ClamAV on iPfire I decided to add ClamAV (clamav. net) to the iPfire mix. ClamAV is an opensource antivirus engine, it can run on the firewall and inspect files that go through. To add a package to the iPfire firewall is really easy, login and then select the addons you would like. I followed this guide on the iPfire Wiki (ClamAV Addon) Login to the admin Menu | ipfire -> Pakfire Select ClamAV and SquidClamAV (you need to add both) Select the + sign and then do the install --> (arrow) Once this was completed I tested out the setup to make sure it worked. I went to this url to test. I decided the default message when you receive a virus or warning was a bit generic. I set out to modify the warning page. Steps to Modify ClamAV warning message When you do detect a virus the clamAV system posts a message on the firewall "http://127. 0. 0. 1:81/clwarn. cgi" This page displays a warning message. The above is my customized message. I changed the image and also wording.... --- - Published: 2014-10-18 - Modified: 2014-10-18 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-media-center-windows-81/ I recently updated my basement and purchased a new TV. In doing so, my projector and TV are both connected to my Windows Media Center. I needed up update my older PC running windows media center since Comcast turned to digital. Here is the setup and configurations I use to run a Windows Media Center that shows live tv and allows me to display on both the projector and TV. HARDWARE and OS PC- Thinkpad T410 Laptop - I chose this because I had it already at the house and it has 8gig ram with a 120 GB SSD drive. It loads fast and allows me to use a second internal 7200 drive and a NAS for storage. OS: Windows 8. 1 with Media Center. media Center is $9. 99 you need to purchase a key. Windows media center allows me to use this PC to watch Live TV. HDMI Splitter - I have a simple HDMI splitter that allows me to share one HDMI source to two tv's - MonoPrice $24 HD Homerun Prime - Great device to allow the use of a cablecard and have 3 tuners. I purchased one on Ebay for about $45. This device lives on your network and can be used by windows media center - http://www. silicondust. com/products/hdhomerun/prime/ Windows Media Center Remote - I have a harmony remote as well but chose to use this one because it is different from the others. I have mapped the On / Off and Volume to... --- - Published: 2014-09-27 - Modified: 2014-09-27 - URL: https://jimiz.net/shellshock-test-system/ In the past few weeks the number of security incidents in the news has increased. Home depot, Jimmy John's and also Shellshock. From credit card theft via malware to online security vulnerabilities you need to keep on guard. This most recent ShellShock vulnerability is going to be big. Since a very large portion of the web is using Linux or some variant of *ux, this security issue touches a lot of places. I won't go into details of the Shellshock bash vunerablity because Troy Hunt does a wonderful job on his blog with this post: http://www. troyhunt. com/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about. html. If you are concernced about any system you may be using I recommend reading that article. After hearing about the issue i quickly decided to test all systems that I have access to. I used a varient of the script that Troy shares (only because I found a reference to this one first). If you are able to ssh or get a bash command line you can test your system. Using this simple script. env VAR=' { :;}; echo Your System is vulnerable! ' bash -c "echo Bash is OK" Here is a view of one of my systems If you are using or managing a website I suggest that you check your system now. This security vulnerability makes it easy for people to do bad things on your system. --- - Published: 2014-09-07 - Modified: 2014-09-07 - URL: https://jimiz.net/change-wordpress-theme-database/ I recently had an issue with a theme when updating wordpress. After the upgrade I was unable to get into the site or the admin. What I discovered was the Theme was causing the issue. I needed a way to change the theme outside of the admin. This post will show you what to change in the Database to set the active theme. Accessing the Database The first thing you will need is access to the database. By either command line or phpMyAdmin. Once you select the database navigate to the wp_options table (you may have another prefix for the table instead of "wp"; Example: blog_options) Edit the Table Once you select the wp_options table you now need to find two rows. (Template and Stylesheet). You will be editing the value in these rows. I had to go to page "2" on phpmyadmin to find the values Once you find the row select the edit icon . You will now need to replace the value with another theme name. In the image below my theme was called "next" I replaced it with "twentyfourteen" If you do not have that theme on your system you can download it here. http://wordpress. org/themes/twentyfourteen Conclusion I was able to change to a theme that worked and make the appropriate adjustments to get the site running. Hope this helps you. --- - Published: 2014-09-04 - Modified: 2014-09-04 - URL: https://jimiz.net/minimal-footprint-online-google/ I attempted a while back to see if I could limit my exposure on the web. Looking at all the security concerns and even my own security fun I decided to see what i could limit. First Steps The first place I looked was to stop all the online leakage and "free info" I was sharing while browsing. You know what I mean, you probably see it every day and don't even notice. This is the info you give to google when you are searching. It is delivered back to you via Google ads and other avenues. Example of ads from a site after my wife was shopping for "board shorts" in a few google searches. To stop this from happening I decided to switch from "google" to DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. If you are not familiar it is a search engine devoted to security. DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the "filter bubble" of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users The second step I did was to not allow the ads to show. This is not really a prevention method for leaking data but rather a way to not have to deal with seeing it. I use Chrome as my default browser and I added a plugin called AdBlock. I know, I know I happen to have ads on this blog (sorry). Round Two After moving to ddg for search I... --- - Published: 2014-08-15 - Modified: 2014-08-15 - URL: https://jimiz.net/reading/ I read a few blogs but recently have been so busy at work have not really kept up with any technical blogs or news. I find that HackerNews keeps me up-to-date as much as possible. If you don't subscribe to the newsletter I would recommend it - go here to signup for hacker news If I don't want to wait for Kale to send his update I view it on my phone using the site http://hn. premii. com/ it is probably the best interface I have seen. Today in the newsletter came a great article on Edward Snowden. It was a good read and worth sharing. http://www. wired. com/2014/08/edward-snowden/ Not only was the article a good read, it was also beautiful. Not sure that I like the scrolling down page, but the layout and interaction was pleasing to me. It is amazing that I am content with a black and white page with text to read, but also enjoy pictures and interaction similar to what Wired did with this article. Hope to post more frequently and maybe with a more creative view. Thank you Wired and Hacker News for providing me with information and news. --- - Published: 2014-07-25 - Modified: 2014-07-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/vpn/ It is summer time and people are traveling for vacation. Heading to hotels, campgrounds, parks, and friends. If your like my family you have many devices you take with you; tablets, smart phones, laptops, and all kinds of wifi devices. As people travel they see free public wifi for use. Please understand that these networks are not secure. The connection you have to the internet is unknown to you. And you should treat any unknown connection as not secure. The best way to make sure you are connecting to the internet safely is to use a VPN on these insecure networks. I recommend wifi-vpn. com as a inexpensive service to use. The VPN connection from any of your devices will encrypt the data that travels over the public wifi to the destination VPN service, then out to the internet. There are some great articles explaining both the reason to use a VPN and also how a VPN works. This is a simple to read easy article explaining more information: http://gizmodo. com/5990192/vpns-what-they-do-how-they-work-and-why-youre-dumb-for-not-using-one VPN services are easy to use and most all operating systems and devices have an option for built in VPN. I use PPTP as the protocol even though it was considered the less secure of all the VPN methods it still performs and secures your information. --- - Published: 2014-01-02 - Modified: 2014-01-02 - URL: https://jimiz.net/www-naked/ I recently read an article from Mads Kristensen (http://madskristensen. net/post/url-rewrite-and-the-www-subdomain). He was posting regarding using a url rewrite for IIS and the use of a subdomain. After reading the article and viewing some info regarding the two camps of "use WWW" and don't use "www". I could not help but reflect on my own experiences. For years, I been fortunate to both build websites and host websites. It always amazed me when people did not understand a simple system like a domain name, even developers. Yes to WWW - http://www. yes-www. org/ No to www - http://no-www. org/ How do you type in a URL Regardless of how you stand it this, Google and the modern browser has really changed how the end users view of how a website works. The ablity in chrome to just type in a search into the address bar has made some of the education regarding the web even harder. Even Internet explorer allows you to type any phrase into the address bar and it will then send you off to bing. The modern browser does it's best to determine if the string entered in the address field is a fully qualified URL (or just a site) or a query. To understand the reason for using www you need to know a little of the terms. There are a few components to understand a domain, a sub-domain, and top-level domain. I'll use my domain name as an example: (www. jimiz. net) TLD - . net... --- - Published: 2013-12-16 - Modified: 2013-12-16 - URL: https://jimiz.net/selling-domains/ Selling Domains A few years ago I purchased a few domain names. I got a great price and have held them since. Recently I decided to sell off those domains. I have not had much experience selling a domain before. The experience I have had, was around purchasing domains. In the past I have been part or brokered a few purchases of domain names for clients. I had a mixed bag of success and failures when working on buying adomain name from an existing party. In one instance the price was over 50K for a domain name. It happened to be the name of an established business. In another case, a domain of a client expired and they worked to purchase it back from a domain holding company. Research Before I just put the domains up for sale I did a little research. From what I could find there were a few methods that were available to choose from. I found the major listings from both google and webforms. There are also a few tools that will place a value on your domain Nokta Domains : They facilitate buying and selling domains, as well as leasing. I ran a valuation on both domains. Godaddy Auctions: This is the section where Godaddy charges you a monthly fee to be a member and list your domain at auction. Sedo - They offer full service for domain selling and auction. They can broker deals and also help find information. Cost can range from... --- - Published: 2013-11-30 - Modified: 2013-11-30 - URL: https://jimiz.net/quickbooks-alternative/ My old Thinkpad that I used as a mini server died, and on that machine I ran an old version of Quickbooks. I have used Quickbooks for invoicing and accounting for about 7 years. It has served me well, however when the machine died I decided to look at upgrading from my 2009 version to the newest. As I looked at options I realized that there may be some alternatives. Quickbooks Versions Today you can get quickbooks in a desktop version or an online version. On the day of writing this you could get Quickbooks from intuit for $199 a 20% discount from the regular price. The other version that seems more fitting is the online version of Quickbooks that starts at 12. 99 a month ($155. 88 a year) for the small business version. Since I have been happy with my old 2009 version of quickbooks it is hard to justify a yearly payment of $156 to use the online service. The only benefit I see from the online service is that it is available from any location. This feature does not really apply to me since I use remote access into my previous machine to connect to Quickbooks. The other features they push for the online version I don't necessary need. Quickbooks Alternatives Since my laptop died, I have been investigating what is out there to use. Here are a few great resources, of other quickbooks alternatives (Capterra - Top 10 QuickBooks alternatives for small business | Exact... --- - Published: 2013-11-24 - Modified: 2013-11-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/install-phonegap-3-windows-8/ PhoneGap 3 I recently wanted to test an idea on an android device. To quickly write up a proof of concept I decided to use PhoneGap. I have used PhoneGap in the past but the current Version 3. 1 (at the time of writing) is more mature than when I previously developed with it. I was prepared to walk through a few hurtles to get my development environment setup to use PhoneGap but was pleasantly surprised with the process. Instead of the hassles of previous versions the install was pretty straight forward. However I found the documentation a bit challenging. Possibly because it was just 2 code boxes for install and usage on the PG site (PhoneGap Install). I decided to share my process for anyone wanting to use PhoneGap on a Windows 8 PC. Install PhoneGap 3 on Windows 8 Software You will need to complete this install (NodeJS and ADK) 1. Because PhoneGap now utilizes NodeJs, you will need this on your system. Download and install Nodejs - It is a quick and easy install and will end up in your program files (I have Win8 x64 and the path is : C:\program files\nodejs) 2. Install the Android Developer Kit (ADK) - You can choose the location for this. In my case i used a folder called (c:\dev\android) 3. Install PhoneGap - Here is where I had a few challenges and hope to simplify the process for anyone. The install page on PhoneGap has these two blocks of... --- - Published: 2013-11-20 - Modified: 2013-12-12 - URL: https://jimiz.net/zentyal-pfsense-firewall-review/ I have posted a few times about my home network and in particular all the great things you can do with DDWRT or with PFsense. I recently had my home PFsense firewall have some issues, mainly to a hard drive failure. When I was replacing it, I decided to try a few different versions of firewalls. HARDWARE The hardware for my firewall is a small ASUS dual core Intel Atom computer, I think it cost me around $80. I then added 2 gigs of RAM and a 100Gig hard drive that I had laying around (which is probably why my hard drive failed). It is now running a 64gig SSD drive. Both firewall versions ran very well on this platform. From a hardware perspective it is probably an overkill for a router but you never know. Here is a quick view of "top" from my zentyal firewall - Note the IDS suricata running at 20% PFsense vs Zentyal As for a comparison of Zentyal vs Pfsense it has been interesting. Overall I think I prefer pfsense, but zentyal is a winner in different areas: User Interface: Zentyal is the winner. I found that their GUI is both easy to use and intuitive. PFsense has everything but can sometimes be confusing with the vast options. One caviot here, Zentyal has a very slow user interface. I just seems to take a long time. The subsection of the interface falls on some reporting. Zentyal seems to be lacking in it's community version... --- - Published: 2013-11-08 - Modified: 2013-11-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/wordpress-cdn/ High Traffic WordPress Sites A few websites that I maintain get a large volume of traffic. They are using Wordpress as a content management system. To accommodate this traffic I have been utilizing a combination of a great service CDN and a caching plugin. A "CDN" is a Content Delivery Network is a service that will store and forward your items to a closer segment on the network. So a user from California is getting information like images from a server closer to California than NewYork. Wordpress CDN options There are a lot of CDN providers available. I have used a few in my previous jobs like Akami , limelight, and Amazon. In recent years I have settled on using CloudFlare. In particular, I have felt great about this choice after a incident where a DDOS was stopped by CloudFlare. Another reason I like there service is the fact you can choose a free option. There is an easy to install CloudFlare plugin and it works very well with W3 Total Cache (one of my favorite plugins). CloudFlare Integration Cloudflare basically takes over the DNS for your site. Once integrated if you ping your website you will get their IP's back. The do give you direct links (direct. domainname. com) or you can add custom. By taking over you DNS they can then distribute the content to the Edge ("closer to the user"). Cloudflare does caching and also minification. It can take your JS, CSS, and minify it to a... --- - Published: 2013-11-08 - Modified: 2013-11-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/magento-18-released/ Magento 1. 8 I am a huge fan of Magento. It is a great ecommerce and shopping cart system. In the last year I have launched a few sites using this system. The flexibility of Magento allowed me to create a B2B site and also B2C. eBay purchased Magento and I have heard a few people trying to figure out what their plans are for the System. It may be a new release in the future? Maybe a 2. 0? In the last few weeks a new version of Magento was released 1. 8. This release promises feature enhancements: Tax enhancements - correcting a few issues Performance enhancements (who can argue with this - Speed is very important and it looks to use less resources) Functional improvement - Quality and settings Security enhancements - Anytime you have an ecommerce site - security is essential I have only had the chance to update 2 sites from 1. 7 to 1. 8, and the experience has been different for both. I started with my development system and site and then did production. Overall I am happy with the upgrade. Upgrade Process The upgrade documentation is a bit confusing. I found that the process is pretty straight forward but the documentation is lacking. The Magento site has some process available here. I found a few other resources and combined the information to make my upgrade. In the end I had a bit of troubleshooting to do, based on permissions and file ownership. Basically... --- - Published: 2013-10-17 - Modified: 2013-10-17 - URL: https://jimiz.net/google-picture-ads-opt/ Google Endorsements Google has recently made a policy change. You may have seen a notification in your gmail or Plus page. I basically just clicked on the "x" or said OK with out thinking about it. I am sure many other prople are like me and don't take much time to read any policy changes. However, recently many news sites started to discuss the changes and some ad features that will come in the future. Google Endorsements, will use your username and pic in ads. I'm not against the idea of endorsing products or ratings, but I don't like my picture being shown (kind of creepy) Google Endorsements http://www. latimes. com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google-ads-user-names-pictures-opt-out-20131011,0,419118. story http://www. wired. com/gadgetlab/2013/10/opt-out-google-ads/ How to Opt Out There is a simple way to allow you to Opt Out of having your Username or Photo shared in ads. You just need to go to this URL: https://plus. google. com/settings/endorsements Un-check the box at the bottom of the page. This will keep google from sharing your name and photo in endorsements. This makes me think of all the privacy polices that I don't read and just accept, what other sites have I allowed to use my information? --- - Published: 2013-10-17 - Modified: 2013-10-17 - URL: https://jimiz.net/fun-computer-tricks-dangerous/ I read a great blog by Troy Hunt frequently. He is an architect and MVP over at Microsoft, he typically talks about security. He recently sent out a quick tweet regarding locking your computer. After the tweet regarding what to do when someone does not lock their screen. http://www. troyhunt. com/2013/10/40-inappropriate-actions-to-take. html I love some of the options. One favorite was to set the wallpaper as a screenshot then remove Icons and toolbar. There are a few that you should not follow that will probably leave you wanting or needing a new job. Funny enough I have done a few of these in --- - Published: 2013-09-04 - Modified: 2013-09-09 - URL: https://jimiz.net/faviconwhat-why-and-how/ If you do not know what a favicon is , it would be hard to explain with out a picture. The Favicon is the little icon that shows up in your browsers tab for a website. In this picture the favicon is highlighted, it happens to be my site’s icon. I also have a few well known sites open; Google, Facebook, Bing, and a site that does not have a favicon. The Favicon Beginning The back story behind the favicon invention, came out a few days ago on a hackernews story (http://ruthlessray. wordpress. com/2013/09/02/inventing-favicon-ico/). It is a great little article worth reading. He talks about how as a project manager he signed off on the creation of an icon that just needed to be added to a root folder. Fast forward many years to a time where web browsers have tabs and having favicon on your site quickly allows people like me with many many tabs open to find what they were doing. Today's Favicon From it’s invention to the use of tabs, the favicon also can cause some technical overhead. Mike Krieger did a great presentation at Airbnb regarding the Scaling of Instagram. During that talk about scaling his 1 billion dollar company, he takes the time to reference the favicon. You may think, how can a site like instagram have an in issue with a favicon. From that article I found another great story on optimizing the favicon. He goes on to discuss the issues instagram had with... --- - Published: 2013-08-24 - Modified: 2013-08-24 - URL: https://jimiz.net/mobile-screenshots-for-presentations/ I often have to do presentations or showcase a site or an application. I find taking pictures or showcasing the application can help many people get a sense of what I am talking about. I recently discovered a great tool to take a screenshot of your app or website using multiple devices. http://placeit. breezi. com/ has Mobile devices, tablets, pc’s and other great images to showcase your app.   These can be great tools to showcase your responsive design or just how your app my look while in use. The site allows you to upload an image or just grab a screen shot from a url.   Take a look at a few of my blog. These action shots look very nice and showcase the responsive design.   Mobile Phone (iPhone 5) MacBook Air Tablet (iPad) --- - Published: 2013-08-23 - Modified: 2023-01-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/web-developer-checklist/ Update for 2023 The team at TopTal has revised and updated the web checklist - Here is the updated link https://www. toptal. com/developers/webdevchecklist Great Improvement: Web checklist this is a great tool to prepare for a website or application launch. --- I was reading some of my news feeds and came across this great site called http://webdevchecklist. com/. It is a creation of Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and Mads Kristensen. I often publish a site and run through a few tests. Some I do religiously, but others I often forget. The list they put together lets you pick and select what area to work in. For example here is a shot of the useable area. I have checked it off the list and expanded that area. It’s showing me tools or sites to validate usability. I went back and looked a recent deployment of mine and ran through the checklist. This is a great tool to use or share with others. From simple things like SEO and robots. txt this list can cover some base questions. --- - Published: 2013-08-03 - Modified: 2013-11-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/magento-premature-script-headers-indexphp/ I recently had an error show on a Magento site. The error showing was : Premature end of script headers: index. php After some searching I found that this is a common error with a few different solutions. In my case I logged into the server and looked at the apache error log. What I found was the error and also what I think was the cause. Premature end of script headers: index. php SoftException in Application. cpp:256: File "/home/somesite/public_html/index. php" is writeable by group The error was actually helpful. After that I was able to do some more detailed searches to see that there was a permissions error. I ended up having to change the permission of the index. php file chmod 644 index. php Here is a good site with some information regarding resetting permissions for http://www. magentocommerce. com/wiki/groups/227/resetting_file_permissions After changing permissions the site just started working. I believe the issue was caused by the server site transfer. --- - Published: 2013-07-15 - Modified: 2013-07-15 - URL: https://jimiz.net/thinkpad-x1-touch/ I am a ThinkPad junkie (proof 1, 2). I currently have 3 active thinkpads in our home. My primary laptop T410, My wife's T410, and our home server (everything PC) t61p. Today I just purchased another thinkpad to add to the collection. I got a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Touch. This is the first touch laptop I have purchased. I have had my eye on the x1 since it initially came out. The original version looked overpriced to me for a ultrabook. But, recently with the addition of 10point touch this device has become the machine that I want to develop on. It has 1600x900 resolution, that is much better than the standard 1366×768 but not quite full HD. I'm ok with that for the main reason it is greater than what I have now. I've ranted about resolution before but in this case, I'm ok with the mid resolution because of the Touch option. If you have not had the chance to use touch on a laptop you are missing out. I thought the overall idea of touch was rediculus until I tried it with a surface pro. I found myself using touch as the 3rd option. I'm a trackpoint user and with a combination of keyboard, trackpoint, and touch this device will be amazing. I've been on the fence about a few other devices (Asus, Samsung, and a few other ultrabooks). I just could not get over missing the track point. Now that the x1 is at an affordable... --- - Published: 2013-07-13 - Modified: 2013-07-13 - URL: https://jimiz.net/tech-travel/ I recently went on a trip to San Francisco for the Microsoft Build Conference. First and foremost the conference was excellent. You can say what you want about Microsoft, but they are making both hardware and great software. Packing for a trip like Build, where everyone got a Surface Pro and another tablet, I had to make sure to be ready to take home more than I took. In my travels over the years for both business and pleasure, I have found a few items key to making trips technically successful. In recent years the items I carry have changed (because technology is constantly changing). I decided to quickly blog a few of my key items. 1. Headphones - I can't say that these are the most important item, but I have to admit that in the times that I have forgot them I have been super angry (even back when all I had was a Disc Man or Walkman). Headphones are not only the best way to tune out people and noise on airplanes and airports but also the most reliable way to do a phone call. I typically just use the ear-buds that come with my iPhone (currently using the EarPods). I also have noise cancelling headphones, but sometimes find them as an extra item to carry. NOTE: I use to carry a Bluetooth headset for all types of calling, but found that with charging needs that the default iPhone headphones make this accessory unnecessary. 2. Computer Backpack... --- - Published: 2013-06-08 - Modified: 2013-06-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/home-phone-free-google-talk/ I just setup our home phone to have free calling and kept our existing number. The new setup I am using incorporates Google voice and an obitalk Obi110 ($40) device. I have been a VOIP user at our house for the last 7 years. I started with Vonage and have switched to a few providers ever since. The most recent Voipo (www. voipo. com) has been amazing. If you are looking for great customer service, fantastic quality, and good price I would recommend them. However, my 2 year contract was up and I wanted to make a change. (They have a great 2year program for $150 for new subscribers). I decided to embark on getting a new setup. I followed the base idea from this article: http://www. howtogeek. com/136959/how-to-switch-to-voip-and-ditch-your-home-phone-bill-forever/ but had to make a few modifications to make this work. Obitalk allows you to use your google voice number and a OBI device (similar in size to the vonage phone box). I wanted to use my existing number, we have been attached to our home phone number for a while (school, friends, family) and since we already use VOIP, we have been used to just forwrding that number to our cell phones when not at the house. To Port our LAN line to google voice and use obitalk I had to add one important step. I had to port my home (LAN) number to a mobile number , before porting it to Google Voice. At the time of writing, google... --- - Published: 2013-06-01 - Modified: 2013-08-21 - URL: https://jimiz.net/printers-home-laser-printer/ I hate printers. They have caused me so much headache over the years. Printers bother me from the standpoint that they don't work when you need them, and most likely they are near or out of ink when they do work. In the past few years, I have had the theory of purchasing the lower to mid level printer and ink at the same time. When I purchase the printer I also get ink (normally at a discount). Then when the ink and the replacement ink run out, I purchase another printer, Sell the one that is out of ink on craigslist and start the process over. I currently have an HP Photosmart C4500 color printer / scanner / wireless printer. It was very inexpensive and works well when it is connected to the network. More often then not, we have to re-start it to have it on the network. Since I have a few kids we tend to print a lot, and the printer is not the most cost effective. Recently I purchased a Brother HL-2240 laser printer. (Brother Site) It allows me to print fast and inexpensive. Also saves me from always having the kids print in color. I purchased it from a big-box office store online and had it shipped. It was refurbished and cost about $40 bucks with a coupon. The beauty of this printer is that it is fast and will print a long time on a toner cartridge. The model I purchased was not... --- - Published: 2013-05-18 - Modified: 2013-05-18 - URL: https://jimiz.net/giro-reverb-commuter-helmet/ Giro ReverbI recently upgraded my helmet to a more fully bodied helmet for commuting to work. I have a Giro Road helmet that really allows for air flow and the ability to cool your head. But for commuting to work and being packed away in my desk it was not all that durable. I decided to go with a more urban looking helmet. The Giro Reverb helmet. It is a lightweight full bodied helmet. I traveled to my local bikeshop to try it on and did not feel like a geek wearing it. One of the reasons I was drawn to this helmet is the simple look and style. It also gets great reviews from both urbanvelo. com and was one of Oprah's Favorite Things in 2012 (no I am not an Oprah fan). Overall the helmet has done what I needed it to do. It is light weight, I feel like I can throw it around and put it down with out feeling it will break. I did find that the visor is somewhat usable on a sunny day (that was an unexpected benefit). This is one investment I feel good about to keep myself safe and comfortable while bike commuting into work. --- - Published: 2013-04-18 - Modified: 2013-04-18 - URL: https://jimiz.net/check-ubuntu-version-command-line/ I often ssh into my home linux server or my remote Machines. Recently I could not remember what flavor (version) of ubuntu I was running. Since I don't use the UI on the server I only had the command line to use. I quickly found a way to show what version you are running. I thought it was interesting that there was not a little command that would do this, in my mind it would be "showversion". However, that command does not exist. If you want to see what version you are running of Ubuntu you issue: lsb_release -a After running the code you are able to see the version under release section. Command Line Version If you just run the "lsb_release" command you will get a message that states "No LSB modules are available. ". The '-a' flag specifices all options. There is another command you can run. cat /etc/issue. net This will also give you the version. cat /etc/issue. net cat /etc/issue. net To see you version in the gui you can use this link as reference https://help. ubuntu. com/community/CheckingYourUbuntuVersion --- - Published: 2013-04-02 - Modified: 2013-04-02 - URL: https://jimiz.net/ubuntu-mint/ I have been using ubuntu for a while. In fact, the last Linux box I had prior was Fedora 10. My current primary linux box is running Ubuntu 10. 4 (a bit outdated). I recently upgraded to 12 and found some performance issues on my dual core Dell Box. The majority of my development Virtual Box images are Mint Linux , I think version 14. These are the virtual machines that I use for development for Wordpress, drupal, and other server development systems. My Magento dev box is also running mint. It seems that I have heard of more people switching to Mint from ubuntu recently. I am unsure of reasons, but it seems that a general frustration with Ubuntu and also some performance complaints. I had decided to give it a try based on some discussions over at hak5. org. Since then, I've just determined that it seemed to run faster than the ubuntu 12 systems. What is your Linux Distro preference? For a long time Ubuntu was the reigning king, now that may not be the case. For those who are interested, Mint was a forked version of Ubuntu. --- - Published: 2013-03-31 - Modified: 2013-12-12 - URL: https://jimiz.net/ipad-vpn-openvpn-pfsense/ I have been waiting for a while for a good openvpn client to be available for the iPad or iPhone with out JailBreaking. A few months back openvpn released an app for the iPad and iPhone. https://itunes. apple. com/us/app/openvpn-connect/id590379981 Head on over and download if you are a pfsense user. I recommend anyone who is using public / unsecured wifi to use VPN. If you don't want to setup a vpn at your home, head on over to WiFi-VPN and setup an account. It is easy and cheap. If you are a DIY type of person, then just read up on PfSense. I have been using PfSense as my main firewall for about a year and it has been fantastic and has helped speed up my connection. If you are looking for something a bit easier, you may want to look at untangled. PFsense and Untangled both allow you to have a PPTP vpn or an OpenVpn Vpn. I have recently moved to using openvpn exclusively now that I have it working on my home network. OpenVPN allows you to use port 443 as the connection port, this will allow you to connect behind most firewall locations. I will be posting in the near future how to setup pfsense to use port 443 and OpenVPN. --- - Published: 2013-03-13 - Modified: 2013-03-13 - URL: https://jimiz.net/iis-6-net-4-404-error/ I just spent the last hour troubleshooting an issue with an upgrade. It had to do with upgrading a website to a new version using . net 4 on an iis 6 (server 2003) machine. I was consistently getting a 404 error when I switched to using the 4. 0 framework I had reapplied 4. 0 framework to iis using aspnet_regiis. Even created a new app pool. In the end it turned out to be a very simple miss on my part. To make it work I only had to enable the "web service extensions". The ASP. net v4. 0 was prohibited. I had completely forgot this even existed. IIS 7 does not have this design model. It is amazing how simple things can cause a lot of challenges. --- - Published: 2013-03-13 - Modified: 2013-03-13 - URL: https://jimiz.net/rip-google-reader/ Google recently announced that it is going to turn off Google reader. Reader. google. com I can remember when it launched in 2005 and I was amazed that I could take all these RSS feeds (web news) and put them in one place. It was not sexy or even good looking, but it allowed me to consume a lot of great info fast. Fast forward about 8 years and I just realized that I have not logged into google reader for over a year. I have moved on, It is not that I don't consume news or info, I just do it different. I seem to use my mobile devices more to consume news and information. I don't seem to use a browser or google reader to surf news. I think the lack of demand is both that RSS is confusing and also people don't think of consuming information that way. Apps like flipboard and reddit basically allow you to see the same information in a very useful way. I remember reading a few articles years back that RSS was dead. At the time I did not think anything about it. In reality it is just a type of communication protocol (even though it is labeled as a web format). The following articles state the lack of consumer appeal of RSS as the reason for Google Reader going away. I tend to agree. http://techcrunch. com/2013/03/13/google-readers-death-is-proof-that-rss-always-suffered-from-lack-of-consumer-appeal/ http://techcrunch. com/2013/03/13/rip-google-reader/ As I was looking at my google reader account after a year away.... --- - Published: 2013-03-11 - Modified: 2013-04-01 - URL: https://jimiz.net/backup-script-sql-express/ I like the usability of Microsoft SQL especially the SQL Express versions. The only few limitations I have ran into have been some of the enterprise feature and things like backup scripts. There is a great Codeplex package that can help http://expressmaint. codeplex. com/ I have used a version of expressmaint for long time. The package from code plex also includes a windows2008 VB application that you can use to schedule the jobs to run. What a great package. --- - Published: 2013-02-25 - Modified: 2013-02-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/suits-music/ In the last few years I have found it hard to find new music. I don't listen to much radio these days, in the Van it is WCSG 91. 3 at all times (the kids love that). I my car I find that I listen to talk radio, either ESPN radio or something like Glenn Beck. So I often don't hear new music. Even if I did listen to the radio I'm not sure it would be the type of music I like. I have a very wide range of music preferences. What I have noticed is that some of the Shows that I watch on TV have had great music. It seems that that this may be a place to find more music that I like. I have mentioned Suits before and how one of the channels I listen to on Spotify is based on that music. NOTE Someone mentioned that Suits is 50% sexy, 50% lawyer Drama with kick A$# music, and I agree. In the season ending episode they had a great song. I tried to Google and find the performer. It turns out that there is a site that lists all the songs per episode for suits and links to purchase is available. Suits - Songs Per Episode After finding the performer was a band called "I'm the King" by the Def Six, I tried to purchase their album. It turns out that you can't purchase anything from them. After reading some comments it sounds like... --- - Published: 2013-02-18 - Modified: 2013-02-18 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-mesh-shutdown/ Feb 13th 2013 is a sad day. Microsoft decided to turn off what I though was one of their best services. They are discontinuing Live Mesh. If you have not heard of Mesh, it was the precursor to SkyDrive. Mesh allowed you to sync and access remote files. It also included the one function that I really loved, Remote Desktop. When you installed Mesh it gave you the ability to remote desktop (RDP) into your windows machines. Now most people know that RDP was built into some versions of windows (ultimate and premium). Because most of my previous Vista and Win7 devices were Home versions they did not have RDP enabled. Mesh allowed you to rdp into a machine. It was a wonderful secure method of remote access. As of Feb 13th 2013, I was no-longer able to remote access my machines. I have tried and currently use many other remote connection means: VNC, LogMeIn, VPN, SSH, however mesh was the easiest of the bunch. I have since moved to Chrome remote Desktop. If you have not tried this before I recommend giving it a run. https://chrome. google. com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp? hl=en It is much smoother than VNC. I run a lot of VPC images (virtual box) and using this to remote access them is pretty easy. With the loss of Mesh I now have found other ways. Thank you Microsoft for the few years of a great service. Here is the note that I got from the Microsoft Team. You should... --- - Published: 2013-02-14 - Modified: 2013-02-14 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-tablet/ I'm a fan of windows 8. Since using it as my primary OS at home and on my development box I find it very stable, fast, and likable. It is interesting that when I'm on a Win7 box I find myself going to the upper right to search or hitting "win+q" to find an app. I spent some time this week using a windows 8 tablet. The touch screen really enhances the OS. I can see why people are raving about the Lenovo Yoga. The desktop is really usable as a tablet interface. If I had to pick an issue, I would say that the OS has a bit of a personality problem. It can be a touch interface and then run back to the old XP days and be a Mouse Keyboard interface. It seems like they are not combined in any way. Even the "metro" version of IE and the desktop version of IE are different enough to make you realize you are using one or the other. There has been a lot of talk about hardware. My impression is that they did a good job on the device. The pro tablet seems a bit big, but it is a full win8 device. http://www. engadget. com/2013/02/13/ifixit-tears-down-the-microsoft-surface-pro/? a_dgi=aolshare_twitter A few months back I used a Windows RT tablet. I enjoyed that as well, however I found it sluggish. I think adding some horsepower to the device may make it more usable. In the end, I can see myself using... --- - Published: 2013-02-04 - Modified: 2013-02-04 - URL: https://jimiz.net/soapui-wcf-error-occurred-verifying-security-message/ I was using soapUI to debug a https wcf webservice and ran into an interesting error. An error occurred when verifying security for the message. I had to do a little digging to find out what this error was regarding. I ended up finding that the setting of WSS-Password Type had to be changed. It was set as blank, and needed to be changed to PasswordText. Once this was changed, the error went away. After changing this I did a bit of digging to understand what this setting was. I found a stack-overflow post regarding this. http://stackoverflow. com/questions/13359629/wcf-webservice-with-username-authentication-test-on-soapui I also tried WCF Test Clent as an option. WCF Test Client is a tool that is built into Visual Studio. You can find this app in your Visual Studio folder. Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11. 0\Common7\IDE That was the location where it was for my Visual Studio 2012. WCFtestclient. exe does not allow for Security settings. It does not allow for a username and password. WCFtest is a very simple app. I am more of a fan of SoapUI, it is such a robust application. --- - Published: 2013-02-03 - Modified: 2013-02-03 - URL: https://jimiz.net/mobile-detect-script/ Mobile Detection ScriptIn the past year I have developed a few mobile websites. These normally consist of a specific mobile view (jquerymobile) or a responsive design. In the case of a specific mobile view, you need some type of mechanism to detect the type of browser that is viewing the site. Because of the ever increasing mobile browsers and devices this is a tricky process. A few sites I created over 2 years ago do not register newer devices (kindle fire, newer androids, etc... ) I recently have decided to use MobileESP as the process to detect and interrogate what type of browser is viewing the site. MobileESP has a few great options that I believe make it the best option. First, they have multiple versions available. A real-time API and also a downloadable version. The realtime API takes into account the ever changing mobile landscape. This option would allow the developer to just have to focus on the action needed with a mobile or tablet like device and not worry about maintaining the list of devices. MobileESP API info Second, the downloadable version includes multiple languages. Ranging from Javascript, java, php, . net, python, and Ruby (even classic asp). Often I find myself writing code in different languages. MobileESP allows the option for each major language (NOTE: I think of these as the major languages on the web). In most cases I enjoy using the javascript version. The project I just completed I used the function DetectMobileQuick - Detects... --- - Published: 2013-01-24 - Modified: 2013-04-01 - URL: https://jimiz.net/changing-wordpress-folder/ Recently moved WordPress from a sub-folder called "/blog" to the root of the site. Jimiz was recently set as jimiz. net/blog and it is now jimiz. net. I have been thinking of doing this for a year or so, just did not want to take the effort to modify all the links. I finally took the challenge and made the change. The site is still catching up, things like Google links and rss feeds are throwing 404 errors but I am addressing them as they come. I followed the following guide http://codex. wordpress. org/Moving_WordPress. It helped address permalinks and how to correct posts. A big challenge I had was related to the navigation and existing links. I used the search and replace plugin and also a 404 notification plugin to let me know what pages had issues. --- - Published: 2013-01-13 - Modified: 2013-01-13 - URL: https://jimiz.net/disable-java-homeland-security/ I was reading my Flipboard feed and noticed an article saying to disable Java based on some zero-day exploit. This article on the The Verge The Verge mentioned that the homeland security team decided to encourage people to disable Java. That is an amazing thing to have a plugin that is as widly used as java to be encourage to be disabled. Here is the information from Homeland Security www. us-cert. gov/cas/techalerts/TA13-010A. html CERT is the Computer Emergency Readiness Team. If you don't know how to disable Java in your particular browser you can reference the above link. I quickly disabled Java on PC's in our home. I only updated the primary browser on each PC. Since I have everyone using Chrome that is a pretty easy fix. Until there is a fix, take a few Min to update your browser. To check I went to the java site and used their detection system. http://java. com/en/download/installed. jsp Java Test --- - Published: 2013-01-06 - Modified: 2013-01-06 - URL: https://jimiz.net/fantastic-design-invention/ I stumbled upon this post and was just amazed. Some people just have great design skill, others have great vision, I think Hartmut Esslinger has both. http://www. designboom. com/technology/hartmut-esslingers-early-apple-computer-and-tablet-designs/# Check out the "Snow White 3" from 1984. --- - Published: 2012-12-23 - Modified: 2012-12-23 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-app-store/ Earlier this month I released two apps into the Windows 8 marketplace (Windows 8 app store). It has been a good experience and shows how Microsoft is doing a great job in creating a developer system to allow for apps. I've posted a few things regarding searching and certification in the Windows 8 Store. The windows 8 dashboard for the store is pretty solid and useful. It has details and great reports for your applications. In the process of releasing IP Address Info and Windows 8 GUID Generator I have become acquainted with the dashboard. When I use a web site frequently I tend to book mark the site and just get used to typing in the url or a shortcut. In the case of the windows 8 store https://appdev. microsoft. com/ I was not able to do this. The Microsoft team did not create a redirect or a landing page at the root level of that site. IT is not too often that I see any 403 errors at the root of a site. Especially the backend to the windows store. 403 forbidden I would have expected a redirect or a login. Instead you get a 403. I am guessing this is just an oversight and will eventually be corrected. The reason I found this was I happened to be traveling and wanted to see if my app was published yet. I remembered the host name (appdev) and assumed I could do appdev. microsoft. com and get to the... --- - Published: 2012-12-15 - Modified: 2012-12-15 - URL: https://jimiz.net/search-windows-app-store-browser/ In most apps stores there is a way to search for apps or categories outside of the default tool. In the new windows app store you are limited to just using the built in search. Searching in the store can be done in two ways (there may be more) 1st Way is to just open charms "Win+Q" then type in the search box and select the store. This will open search results for the windows app store. (see screen shot) Search From Charm 2nd Way: Open the Windows App Store, then go to charms (either move the mouse to right side or "win+q" and then type in the search box (see screen shot below for "guid" search) It shows results in the search charm area. Search inside store The search is pretty good once you figure out how to do it. You would expect a search bar in the store, but the windows store app design principal is to use the charm area for global searching. In theory this makes sense for all apps, but takes a bit to get used to (if people will get used to it). Unlike other app stores, the windows store does not have a web browser or web app that let's you search the store. Apple allows you to go to their store to search and browse by category www. apple. com/webapps/. Google / Android also have this same feature play. google. com/store/apps. Microsoft does not currently have a way to do this currently... --- - Published: 2012-12-05 - Modified: 2012-12-05 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-store-app-launch/ IP Address Info has launched to the windows store. You can read more here at the windows store site. http://apps. microsoft. com/webpdp/app/ip-address-info/7a98190a-ef5f-4399-bc3d-7ff1e2f1a37b --- - Published: 2012-12-05 - Modified: 2012-12-15 - URL: https://jimiz.net/privacy-policy-windows-store-apps/ I recently submitted two apps to the windows Store. One was a WinJs app and the Other was a WinRT C# App. Both were rejected because of content compliance. The message that was posted to the dashboard: Your app doesn't meet requirement 4. 1. Notes from Testers: . C:: The app has declared access to network capabilities and no privacy statement was provided in the Windows Settings Charm. What this translates to is that I did not have a privacy policy specified in the Description and also on the Windows setting Charm. Because the application connects to the internet and has the option the capabilities section you are required to have a privacy policy. You can read more about it here from the Windows App certification requirements. In a WinJS app this is an easy fix. However it took me a bit to figure out how to do this in a C# app. The final fix is pretty straight forward. I wish that Microsoft would have stubbed this out in their template and allowed people to just add this either in the Manifest or just in code. I have added a simple privacy policy Windows Store app example project if anyone wants to see a working example. -- SimplePrivacyPolicy. zip To add a privacy polity to your app you can use the steps below. 1. Edit your App. xaml. cs file 2. You will need to add a using statement for Windows. UI. ApplicationSettings using Windows. UI. ApplicationSettings; 3. Add... --- - Published: 2012-11-29 - Modified: 2012-11-29 - URL: https://jimiz.net/zip-tar-gzip-linux/ I often asked questions regarding Linux. Yesterday I was asked how to unzip a file. An individual new to Linux received a . zip file and was unable unzip it. They were using a terminal window. Zip / Unzip I believe that zip is common to most all distributions. It does not do the best job of compression but it works. To unzip a file from a command line in Linux you use unzip ZIPFILENAME. zip To Zip a file you only need to reverse that command zip -r YOURNEWZIPFILE. zip directory_to_zip Tar Tar stands for "Tape ARchive" it was used for backing up to tape. If you are a frequent Linux user you will have seen a . tar file. Tar is quick an dirty. It does not have the best compression but it is fast. To un-tar or extract a tar file tar -xvf TARFILENAME. tar To Tar a directory or file tar -cvf TARFILENAME. tar. gz directory-name GZ or Tar. GZ This is probably the most common file type you will see when using Linux. This does very good compression and is quick. To untar and un-gzip (decompress) a file tar -zxvf TARFILENAME. tar. gz To Compression and Tar gzip a directory tar -zcvf NEWTARFILENAME. tar. gz directory-name The switches in the call: -z: Compress archive using gzip program -c: Create archive -v: Verbose this will display progress to the terminal -f: Archive File name --- - Published: 2012-11-28 - Modified: 2012-11-28 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-store-app-submission/ I have 2 apps submitted to the Windows Store. The first app I posted on 11/23/2011 and the second today 11/28. Both are currently in the "In Certification" stage. Unfortunately the initial app has been in the same state for 5 days. The issue as I have been informed was initially the verification of my identification by Symantec. Microsoft outsourced the security / validation to them. I ended up needing to email / Chat / call their support to resolve the issue. I was told it could take up to 72 hours before any change. So far the technical side of submitting the application has been a great experience. I'm not sure on the rest of the process, can't wait for the next step. The application I created was a simple GUID Generator. Allowing people to generate a large number of GUIDs for re-use. The Dev Center shows you status. --- - Published: 2012-11-25 - Modified: 2012-11-25 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-upgrade-windowsold-folder/ After upgrading to windows 8 on my laptop with an SSD drive. I found that the drive had lost a lot of space. This was due to the size of the c:\windows. old folder. I had attempted to remove this folder a few times through DOS and also Windows Explorer. The attempts to delete the folder did not work. The permissions would not allow it. I was able to free up space and remove that directory using Disk Cleanup. 1. Open Disk Cleanup. Open the charm area and search for "disk cleanup" under settings. To open the charm search use WindowKey+w then highlight settings and search for disk cleanup. You will choose "Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files" 2. Select your drive in my case it was c: 3. In the Disk Cleanup windows click the "clean up system files" button 4. Then you can select the "Previous Windows Installation(s) check box" This may take a while to clean. --- - Published: 2012-11-24 - Modified: 2012-11-24 - URL: https://jimiz.net/nest/ I don't often go out for Black Friday. I like the idea of deals, but do not like dealing with people. So this year my wife asked to get the nest (nest. com) - The learning thermostat. Lowe's had the system on sale. So instead of heading to their store with thousands of other people. I got up in the morning and ordered it online for pickup later that day. If you have not used the order to store feature I suggest it. The nest system is fantastic. It looks great and is packaged even better. I think the Nest team brought the design of Apple to the home business. The box comes with everything you need. Even a multi-tool screwdriver. I plan to keep that handy around the house. Enough about the box. The actual device looks great as well. On the wall it looks like a command center of a modern home. I was able to mount the nest and replace our programmable system in about 30 min. The instructions were not only extremely detailed but easy to read and use. Here are some photos of the packaging --- - Published: 2012-11-24 - Modified: 2012-11-24 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-store-app-send-email/ I have just submitted my first app to the Windows app store. I will send the link out once it gets approved. During the development process I had experimented with a lot of options for my applications. I finally decided to use an html / javascript app type. The choices in for the Windows Store Apps are C#/VB, C++, or HTML/Javascript. In that choice you gain some features and lose some features. In my application I had intended to allow the user to send data to themselves. Basically a copy / paste of contents to send as a reference. I found it was difficult to do this. I was able to create a method that uses the "Mailto" link reference. In discussion forms it sounds like sharing is the proper way to do this. However the html app development had not implemented sharing yet (MSDN) or it is not supported for text or html. To get around this I used a mailto and launcher option. // The URI Mailto to launch - I had to htmlencode var uriMailTo = "mailto:someemail@somedomain. com? subject=SomeSubject&body=Welcome%20to%20my%application"; // Create a Uri object from a URI string - var uri = new Windows. Foundation. Uri(uriMailTo); // Launch the URI Windows. System. Launcher. launchUriAsync(uri). then( function (success) { if (success) { } else { } }); The uriMailTo variable contains the main information. "mailto:someemail@somedomain. com? subject=SomeSubject&body=Welcome%20to%20my%application" Notice that we need to use html encoded characters "%20" is a space The uri is then set to an Windows.... --- - Published: 2012-11-22 - Modified: 2012-11-22 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-media-center-remote-potato/ I've blogged about recently upgrading to windows 8 on my media center. I now have everything running as it was. Including the best accessory to media center, Remote Potato. (www. remotepotato. com/) This application allows you to remotely view and control your media center. It can stream to a browser (silverlight) or through their mobile app. The team recently updated the app to have windows 8 support. I use it frequently to watch movies on my PC and on the iPad. --- - Published: 2012-11-20 - Modified: 2012-11-22 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-windows-store-app-icons/ If you are developing a windows store app (an app for windows 8) you may be in need of some icons. A great way to get some icons that are already available is to use the built-in Segoe UI Symbol font. This is what is referenced when you see the MSDN samples regarding the app bar. I did not have a clue what  stood for. It is a reference to a font item from Segoe UI Symbol. You can see all these icons by using the Character Map application. Launch the search charm and type in Character Map Once you have the Character Map open you can browse the icon set. Scroll down the list to see icons. In the image above I am selecting the pencil icon for edit. You can reference it by the name in the status bar at the bottom "U+E104" private use. This would equal  . To use the icon you enter the item below into your button. Content="" To use these icons you only need to use the built in. I have also found if you use the select button then copy button out of the character map applcation and paste the value it will work. The strange part, is that you can't see that value. That strange character near "icon:' is the refresh icon. It shows up in my application like this. Overall this is a nice little feature to have when working with these apps. --- - Published: 2012-11-09 - Modified: 2012-11-09 - URL: https://jimiz.net/pfsense-sarg-squid-reports/ A few months back I posted how to setup SARG on pfsense router. Since then there has been a great package created for SARG that works on p. I have uninstalled the components I earlier configured and now use this package. Here is the config and setup for this on pfsense. A listing from the Packages area (Admin | System | packages); You will select the install option : From there you can now configure SARG Under Status you will now see SARG Reports The SARG area has a few tabs. General where you set the report options and report types Users location to set user info. Since I use SQUID in transparent mode I don't have specific users but rather ip address. I set alias's for each IP (computer) on the network. You can do this under the user association. Here is an example of our Kermit server "192. 168. 2. 103 Kermit" Schedule Where you set the frequency of the reports: I have mine set to every 4 hours View Report is where you will go to see the regenerated reports (see below) RealTime this is a great feature. Once you select "show log" you get to see active connections. I love this page. XMLRPC sync allows you to share with remote servers Help informs you on all the options and settings If you select the reports tab you can see any generated reports. Since it was just installed depending on your run interval it may not be... --- - Published: 2012-11-05 - Modified: 2012-11-05 - URL: https://jimiz.net/blogs-read-2012/ Every Time I upgrade my Laptop I take inventory of my bookmarks or Favorites. I tend to get a bit sloppy so I just organize by cleaning house. The one thing I don't get rid of is my google reader feed and the blogs on that feed. In an attempt to share some links I decided to post a few that I frequent. (mostly from Flipboard) Geeky Sites Engadget Gizmodo TechCrunch Tech Goodness Unpluggd TheWirecutter Scott Hanselman LifeHacker Biking Urban Velo Momentum Magazine --- - Published: 2012-11-04 - Modified: 2012-11-04 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-close-application/ I have been asked twice from new windows 8 users on how to close an application. I find it funny to think that people have been running apps in the background and not know how to shut them down. There are 3 basic ways to close an app in windows 8: 1. In a Metro app you use your mouse and click from the top of the page and drag all the way to the bottom of the screen. 2. ALT + F4 : However I have had mixed or non working with Metro apps 3. Use ALT+CTRL+DEL and kill the application in task manager If you have a touch screen your option is similar to 1. However you touch and drag to the bottom. I hope someone finds these useful. Here is video showing the drag action to close the app. --- - Published: 2012-11-03 - Modified: 2012-11-03 - URL: https://jimiz.net/magento-debug-modifications/ I have been using Magento more frequently. One of the great benefits of this system is the ablity to customize the application and change it's behavior. One of the downsides is because of the ability to customize the overall folder structure can be a bit challenging if you are not familiar with it. The structure is well laid out but is very deep in folders. An example is the location of the price file. Intially I found the old price file located under view, but then discovered the correct one. /public_html/app/design/frontend//default/template/catalog/product/price. phtml A great tool inside Magento to help debug and troubleshoot where files are located is called the "Template Path Hints" setting in the admin. Log into the Admin and go to System | Configuration Then select your Default Store View (if you don't you will add this debug to your admin section- it makes it hard to navigate) Once in your default store select the Advanced area on the left | Developer | Debug area Change the "Template Path Hints" to Yes. I have created a video of this process. You can watch it on youtube. com --- - Published: 2012-11-01 - Modified: 2012-11-01 - URL: https://jimiz.net/rss-safari-ios-6/ Apple released the new iOS6 in September. The new OS has some great features and new enhancements. The one item I am baffled about and have not read much about is the removal of native RSS viewing from Safari. This may not sound like much but prior to iOS6 on an iPad or iPhone you could go directly to an RSS feed (definition here) and view it's contents. It was not super pretty but it got the job done. This basically let you open RSS from the browser. You may wonder why I care about this. The main reason is that Apple did not supply an alternative method. The reality is that I have an internal mobile web app that linked off to an RSS feed. Once a user upgrades the link to the RSS feed appears broke. It is not broken but rather the iOS device (iPad or iPhone) does not know what to do with the RSS content. Funny enough the iPad thought it was a podcast and then errors. To correct this issue I have tried to download a few RSS Apps, but most of them require an account (Google reader) and others. I would normally think apple would 1) provide a reader app 2) provide a way to redirect to an app from safari or 3) communicate a way to tell safari handle this. I started the process today to re-write the app to consume the rss server side and distribute to the mobile web. This... --- - Published: 2012-10-27 - Modified: 2012-10-29 - URL: https://jimiz.net/wireless-fun-mdk3-ubuntu/ I decided to have some fun with the wireless network this weekend. I have a lot of neighbors and when you look at wireless you see a ton of SSID's. A nifty little program called MDK3 allows you to broadcast a lot of SSID's. I was watching one of the podcasts I follow and they mentioned the tool. I decided to give it a try on my Ubuntu 12. 04 machine. Here is a pic of the final view with all the networks from a windows 7 laptop. Notice all the insecure WiFi networks. I'll share the list I used later in the post. To make this happen you will need to download the most current version of MDK3. Here is the LINK: http://homepages. tu-darmstadt. de/~p_larbig/wlan/mdk3-v6. tar. bz2 ( Ver 6 - Current as of 10/27/2012) If you are on backtrack or another version of ubuntu you can just download / unzip / make / make install. On Ubuntu 12. 04 you need to make a small modification before compiling. Once you download you need to unzip the file sudo bzip2 -d mdk3-v6. tar. bz2 Then untar the file tar -xvf mdk3-v6. tar Change into the directory mdk3-v6 and modify the Makefile sudo nano Makefile Modify the following line and remove the "l" LINKFLAGS = -lpthread to read LINKFLAGS = -pthread LINKFLAGS = -pthread Save the file "Ctrl O" and Exit "ctrl x" Now to compile the code. sudo make Make and install app sudo make install You are now... --- - Published: 2012-10-27 - Modified: 2012-10-27 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-media-center-free-january/ In my last post I walked through the install of windows 8 Media Center. During the process I purchased the feature. After looking at the news (google) it appears that Microsoft is offering the feature key for Windows 8 Media Center Pack for free. Head to this site to redeem your key: http://windows. microsoft. com/en-US/windows-8/feature-packs Enter in your email and they will send you the Feature Pack for Free. I guess i'm out 10 bucks. --- - Published: 2012-10-26 - Modified: 2012-10-27 - URL: https://jimiz.net/windows-8-media-center/ I upgraded my media center PC last week to Windows 8. Since that day, I have been missing media center. The Media PC in our basement was running windows 7 and that was the way we watched TV. It is hooked to a projector and has a great media center remote. Today Friday 10/26/2012 Microsoft released the media center pack for windows 8. I selected to add a feature and paid my $9. 99 for this feature. Note to Microsoft, I'd pay almost any amount for Media center, it is the best Media Center software. However, don't make me pay later for it. Have a version of Windows 8 that is just media center. I hate paying later for things. As I mentioned after I purchased the Mediacenter feature they sent me a key. The first purchase failed because it would not take Paypal. It would never move to the paypal screen, so I had to use my CreditCard. When you purchase a feature you get a window to accept the feature The next window is the install process of media center for Windows 8. NOTE - the wording this feature may cause a reboot. I use a hauppauge 1600 to gather live TV. I also have a hauppauge usb 950q but found the performance to be sub-par. I think that media center is the best HTPC interface when using live TV. However, windows 8 will have to be evaluated. The install of media center 8 the took about 10... --- - Published: 2012-10-21 - Modified: 2020-05-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/screenshot-software-jing-alternative/ I have been a longtime user of Jing from Techsmith. Until recently this was my go-to software for screen captures or video. I have watched people be amazed when I just take a screen capture circle an area make a comment and upload to screen share. Recently, I have noticed that Jing has become a bit slower and somewhat of a memory hog. When I restaged my current development box I was unable to add this from work (blocked) and attempted to use the built-in snipping tool in windows. Snipping tool . Though it allows me to highlight and circle the colors it did not have close to the features of Jing. This left me looking for an alternative. Jing had 3 great features for me. 1st It allowed the use of hotkeys (any keys you wanted). 2nd - It took screen captures or videos. 3rd - you could get menu options or website dropdown navigation screenshots. I next tried shotty . This was a nifty tool but seemed too difficult to just use. I was never successful with the hotkeys. I am now using greenshot. It is super easy to use and is kind of fun. It has a hotkey of the print button on most PC's. To get the video I have switched to camstudio . It takes great screen videos. It allows you to select a region on the screen and take a video. What a great tool. Download and give it a try Overall it took... --- - Published: 2012-10-21 - Modified: 2012-10-21 - URL: https://jimiz.net/magento-google-analytics/ Magento is a great opensource eCommerce package. If you have not heard of it, you should head to their site and check it out. In a recent project I was working through a transition from ASPdotnetstorefront over to Magento. During the process I wanted to move the Google Analytics over. With great supprise I found that it is built into the software. Way to go Magento. To add in your Google Analytics code to magento you only need your Google Analytics ID. It will look similar to this string starting with a UA ( UA-35255053-1). In your Magento Admin navigate to: System -> Configuration -> Sales -> Google API -> Google Analytics You will need to Enable this feature and add your code. Here are a few screen grabs: System | Configuration Sales | Google API Enable and Add code This task to add analytics is pretty straightforward. Great work Magento. Look for some more posts on magento in the future. UPDATE - here is the official link and directions from magento. --- - Published: 2012-10-18 - Modified: 2012-10-18 - URL: https://jimiz.net/airport-extreme-export-key-equivalent-network-password/ Dear apple, please make any text in your applications available to be copied in windows. In particular the text from the "equivalent network password" section on your airport extreme wireless base station. If there is one thing I hate, it is not being able to copy text. The Control+C keyboard shortcut is my favorite. What upsets me is when I can't highlight text to copy it. That is what happened today when attempting to copy and past the longest string of text ever, the 5ghz pre-shared key for my network. If you own an airport extreme router you can get your pre-shared keys by going to the airport utility and selecting BASESTATION > equivalent network password this opens a great window with the information you are looking for. But, you can't copy that info. (it sounds like on the mac version of the software you can). For all developers who read this, make text or labels available to the clipboard. --- - Published: 2012-10-11 - Modified: 2012-10-11 - URL: https://jimiz.net/mobile-web-testing/ I have been doing more mobile web sites recently. My preference has been to use responsive design that allows for any display size. The display size can range from Desktop, TV, tablet or phone. However, I have found it is important to know your target audience and also do testing. Not all browsers are understanding of the @media and HTML5 components. I have found a few testing tools that I continue to use: Keynote Ripple (chrome plugin) Electric Plum - Simulator - You can get a free version through webmatrix iPadPeak - An online tool I typically use a combination of these tools to make sure that the mobile site will function and look correctly on multiple devices. Developing mobile first, is a great method to make sure that you are allowing your site to load properly on a mobile device. Whether it's jquerymobile or a responsive site, you have to be performance minded in your development. My next post I will run through the tools I use for performance testing --- - Published: 2012-10-08 - Modified: 2012-10-08 - URL: https://jimiz.net/thinkpad-turns-20-ibm/ I read this article on the Verge this morning regarding ThinkPad turning 20. I was just amazed that it has been around that long. I remember the first ThinkPad I saw. It may have been one of the first laptops I had ever seen. It was this large black square (amazing). Over the years the ThinkPad has evolved, but it still has it iconic look. After reading how it was the first laptop in space, first laptop with a CD-rom, DVD-rom, and built in wireless I was impressed. Almost everyone that knows me has heard me talk about the ThinkPad. I currently have 3 of them, well really we have 3 of them in the house (business computer, Wife's Laptop, and mine). My first Thinkpad was a 600. It was about perfect, I had about 5 of them over the course of time. They were compact size and just work horses. I have had a lot of laptops over the course of my career, and none have worked as well as a ThinkPad. ThinkPads are no-longer considered sexy as they may have been back when they first came out. Today's ultrabooks are sleek and shiny, the flat black ThinkPad does not have that appeal. However the new x1 carbon looks like it may start a trend. So Happy 20th ThinkPad. I hope to have another 20 with my Trackpoint. --- - Published: 2012-10-06 - Modified: 2012-10-06 - URL: https://jimiz.net/unwanted-software-toolbars/ I hate toolbars on my browsers. I despise unwanted software, this is why I was very upset recently with a java update that was being installed on my wife's computer. For some reason the most recent version of Oracle Java has added the McAfee Security Scan into it's install. I am not sure if it was a java update or the initial install but this is upsetting. Especially since java is needed for a lot of apps and sites. I understand if I just downloaded some software and that software includes a free trial of Software (? ? ) or wants to install a toolbar for their system. This upsets me, but I feel that I made the choice to install the software and that is the price to pay. With Java I feel that it is a needed addition / plugin to do work or use the web. It is my view that adding a toolbar or in this case McAfee Secure scan is very intrusive or malicious. My wife had asked me earlier in the day if she should update java (as usual I said yes). I did not realize that it would install another app. After seeing this installed I did a quick takeover of my parents computers which also had this software installed (I encourage my parents to trust Java updates and Microsoft only). That will have to change, I don't think I can trust updates now that try and slip another application into their update.... --- - Published: 2012-10-03 - Modified: 2012-10-03 - URL: https://jimiz.net/commuter-panniers/ I have been biking into work for a while with a backpack. When I purchased my Raleigh commuter I also got a rack for the back. I had fully intended to get some panniers right away and see how they worked. It took me until July to get a set. I went to a few local bike shops looking for what was available. After 3 shops it was clear that I would have to look elsewhere. Many shops had small panniers or expensive waterproof large ones. What I wanted was a reasonable priced pannier that could hold my laptop and a few items. Most were too small for a 14 inch laptop and if there were large enough, it was just one large compartment. I did find one to try at Ada Bikeshop downtown. I got them home and realized they were just too large for the bike. My feet would hit them when peddling. So to my surprise I was in a Meijer store looking at a kickstand for my daughters bike and I saw a set of Schwinn Panniers. The were only $27, came in a pair, and would fit a laptop. So this week I set off to work with one strapped to the rear rack. It was great, no backpack and I did not notice the weight. However, when crossing the major 5 lane road near my house, the pannier got stuck in my spokes. I did not have a clue what it was but it... --- - Published: 2012-09-16 - Modified: 2012-09-16 - URL: https://jimiz.net/news-newspapers-information/ I realized that I'm not that up today with my news. I don't watch the evening news and I don't typically read any papers during the week. Maybe I'm just behind the times. The news I do read / watch is technical news and world news. I get this from Flipboard . I also subscribe to the local paper, the Sunday edition. We do read the paper in our house, though the global stories I may already know about, the local ones are great. The best part of the local paper for me is the local stories, business, and editorials. I don't read it for global news, because I can get that somewhere else. I love information regarding our local area. In our home, we also subscribe to a few magazines; Outside, Inc, Mens Journal, and Fast company. It is interesting to see similar articles in each magazine about the same topic with a different spin. However, both cover the same facts. How trustworthy is online news? I tend to take some of it with a grain of salt. Rumors, gossip, and ideas tent to be abundant on the web. Take for example my blog. I tend to only write about things I care about, and skip the rest. I personally would not find my site a great place for news, but rather a place for conversation. This article from Read Write Web shows how tools of journalism may have fallen to the wayside in this new age. http://www. readwriteweb.... --- - Published: 2012-09-07 - Modified: 2012-09-07 - URL: https://jimiz.net/mobile-responsive-design/ I've got a lot of email lately and also people asking about responsive design. They are interested in what it is and why anyone would do it. The typical conversation revolves around the definition that response design allows you to target any type of display size (mobile, tablet, desktop ,etc). Once people hear that, they instantly go to one of two responses. The first is of pure interest because they want their site to be mobile, or the second is defensive where they have just updated their site to be mobile friendly. I can understand both reactions. The third reaction similar to what I had was based on pure curiosity. I have been a user of twitterbootstrap that aproaches responsive design as a framework with Grids. However, this is more of a framework that let's you apply a responsive design. A resent article that I have read (and re-read) is based on mobile first design. Give this article a read to see how mobile first and responsive design can be incorporated into wordpress http://wp. smashingmagazine. com/2012/06/28/create-responsive-mobile-first-wordpress-theme/ I have mentioned that this blog is now responsive and can be viewed on many displays. One of which is TV. We are in a time where mobile (tablets and smartphones) are now becoming a larger percentage of web browsers. However, let's not forget TV. A responsive site will allow for any display TV included to have an adaptive view. I have used screenfly and Keynote Mite to view sites I have developed on... --- ---