This might be the best keyboard I have ever used. — There’s something about computer keyboards…even in this age of tablets and phones they remain the primary way we get significant amounts of text and code into computers. I’ve spent time with the original IBM Model M “buckling spring”, the first generation Kinesis Advantage, ThinkPad keyboards (still one of the absolute…

If you pay for the privilege of Amazon Prime, Amazon has a new feature they have quietly rolled out that changes the way your family members interact with your Prime Membership. The tl;dr is that if you are grandfathered into the older method of family management that enabled you to…

After helping a friend troubleshoot issues stemming from the difference between Microsoft’s MSI and Click-to-Run installers, I am now convinced that all knowledge base articles that ask for feedback need an additional checkbox. (background, friend had legal Office 2013 license installed via MSI. Bought Project as a downloadable online…

I’ve been enjoying OpenSUSE’s Tumbleweed distribution. It has all of the benefits of a rolling release like Arch without some of the instability. Unfortunately, my standby for lots of testing, LXC, doesn’t quite work out of the box. You can retrieve images with lxc-create -n name -t download but the…

Using SaltStack to recover from CVE-2015–0235 (Qualys Security Advisory, GHOST: glibc gethostbyname buffer overflow) Most of us sysadmin types were pounded with this announcement this morning. The GHOST vulnerability is worth patching against—most Linux distros have already released patches—but it’s useful to know if your machines are vulnerable, or if…

Claud Xiao from Palo Alto Networks has been in touch with me and I updated this script with his recommendations. Please note I don’t plan to add Windows support, the anti-malware vendors do a great job maintaining signatures and removing stuff like this. The news hit the fan early yesterday…

Several weeks ago I installed Salt on all my Macs. I have 7 currently, two of which cannot run Mavericks and are stuck at Lion (10.7). …