@jnoxon's thoughts

One of the 4TB external USB hard drives I use for local backups started randomly disconnecting a few days ago. Today it failed completely. It’s a Seagate Backup Plus model, where the bottom of the enclosure consists of a small, removable shim that contains the USB & power connections and the USB to SATA converter chip. After trying different USB ports and cables without success, I decided to hook up the drive directly using SATA. [Read More]

My Amazon EC2 discount contract is almost up, and I’ve been playing with Google Compute Engine (GCE). Initial impressions are that it’s faster and costs less money, particularly if you don’t want to pay up-front for EC2 reserved instances. Google’s web console is more modern than Amazon’s, though slightly less sophisticated. Google’s CLI tools are much faster and don’t require Java. Google’s API uses JSON instead of XML. In terms of capabilities, GCE is not as advanced as EC2, but it’s vastly more powerful than Linode, Digital Ocean, and the like. [Read More]

I frequently connect to insecure Wi-Fi networks on my iOS devices and my Mac. Aside from the risk of eavesdropping and malware when connecting to these hotspots, they frequently block access to services, insert advertisements in web pages, or worse. To work around these problems, I’ve tried numerous virtual private network (VPN) services. My experience with most of them has been awful. They tend to connect slowly or not at all, and I frequently can’t access anything on the Internet once the VPN connection is made. [Read More]

A couple of years ago, I was inspired to improve my diet. As part of that, I started drinking my coffee black. As someone who formerly drank coffee with lots of artificial sweetener and non-dairy “creamer” or milk, it came as a surprise that the switch was pretty easy. I got used to black coffee in a week or two and haven’t looked back. I’ve since discovered that coffee with any kind of creamer or sweetener has now become completely unpalatable. [Read More]

I’ve been using a Dropbox public folder and some Apache trickery to share files directly from Dropbox on my own domain at pub.noxon.cc. Dropbox is drag-and-drop file sharing at its finest, and by sharing my files on my own domain instead of on dl.dropboxusercontent.com, my files are accessible to corporate folks who would otherwise find themselves blocked by an over-zealous web filter. Last but not least, if one of my files becomes too popular, Dropbox won’t shut down my account. [Read More]