Computers ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Brian Bilbrey September 25, 2017

25 September 2017

That was a chore-filled weekend. The lawns are all lovely and flat, and nearly the whole house is much, much cleaner. But I was bloody exhausted by the time last night rolled around. So sorry. * * * Only big news is upgrading my MacBook Pro to the latest MacOS release: High Sierra. I'd popped for one of the Beta releases earlier in the Summer, and put in a few issue reports before reverting to Sierra. All of the issues I reported actually garnered responses from Apple, and they've all been remediated in the GA release of the OS. Frankly,…

Brian Bilbrey September 17, 2017

17 September 2017

A busy week and weekend. We made it down to Melford Pond for a couple of hours of fishing on Saturday morning. Well, Marcia was fishing (and caught a decent-sized catfish that she put back, might I add!), while I walked the dog around the pond. It was a nice start to the weekend. Chores: Mowing the lawns, changing old, worn-out locksets out for new ones that work properly, etc, etc. * * * Tech-side, I've been playing around with Flask (a Python web framework). Yeah, should I find something more bleeding edge? Probably. Maybe I'll revisit Node shortly. Or…

Brian Bilbrey April 30, 2017

30 April 2017

I spent two awesome days attending BSidesCharm this weekend (not an HTTPS link, odd for a security conference, eh?). I was there from morning keynote through final talk both days, and I learned something from every speaker. So, big win. If you're in (or interested in) InfoSec, and you're local to the Baltimore/DC area, you really should be going to this conference. The tickets sell out fast, so keep your eye on things for next year. That said, I got absolutely nothing else done this weekend. As it should be. Catching up should be fun... NOT! * * * Our…

Brian Bilbrey April 28, 2017

28 Apr 2017

Ubuntu upgrade news: I upgraded a Kubuntu 16.10 workstation to 17.04 this week. I ran into just one big issue. I'd previously been running the open source nouveau driver for the nVidia card in that system. After the upgrade, I could not keep the desktop running for more than about 5 minutes before the screen would freeze. After a bit of search-engine foo, I found that the recommended solution was to use the nVidia binary driver instead. As sad as that makes RMS, I went back down that rabbit hole. A brief visit via remote connection (unaffected by the frozen…

Brian Bilbrey April 16, 2017

16 April 2017

Oh, first: Release your tax info, President Trump. Note: No one paid me to say that. Just do the right thing, please. Just this once... * * * Here's a happy dog: This dog had to deal with Marcia's trip, immediately followed by mine. About 16 hours after Marcia got home, Saturday last, I hopped onto a plane headed for Denver. There, I spent a week in a Red Hat Automation with Ansible class, wrapping up with a brutal four hour practical exam. I learned a bunch of stuff, and I passed the exam. That also extended my RHCE/RHCSA certs…