In a perfect world I would spend my time between inventing great new devices and systems that inspire and revolutionize things and following up on hobbies like photography and movies. In the imperfect world that we live in I work in IT to pay the mortgage and food bill by creating and maintaining computer systems that make the world of business tick over.
My original training began with computers and physics back in the early 80’s at Canterbury University weaving a career that included pumping gas, frying at McDonald’s, driver education and finally a long spell in IT.
Like most parents of school aged children my life revolves around kids, school, work and kids. Our son is our life right now and we love him dearly but we yearn for our own space and time.
This blog is about things that interest me, things that inspire me and my particular slant on life. Drop by anytime and flick me a comment if you like. I have currently disabled comments on posts because I get no-end of spam but we can still be reach on the contact us page.
You will notice as time goes by that the inside of the scanner glass gets dirty. The good news is that for this scanner at least, cleaning the glass is really easy. Firstly remove the scanner lid by unplugging the … Continue reading →
When I was creating a VSTS Git post-commit service hook it became clear fairly quickly that I needed to be able to simulate calls from VSTS using SoapUI. This is what I did. SoapUI: https://www.soapui.org/downloads/soapui.html Python script to capture VSTS … Continue reading →
I had a really strange problem, I was writing a tiny Python script to learn about Python and it was writing to /var/tmp. Only problem was the file never turned up. This script was run from within Apache 2 on … Continue reading →
Want to run Python from Apache 2.4, this is what I did to get it working. For this exercise I am creating a web hook script and want to run them from the custom folder “/srv/www/webhooks/”. Apache config changes First … Continue reading →
I have my public web server in my DMZ which is running on a VLAN. I am getting timeouts on my SSH connections. Login to the admin console and get to “Firewall | Access Rules” and change the viewing style … Continue reading →
During a conversation in the weekend I was reminded of a visit to Motat 2 where they hide the steamies. We paid a visit in November 2016 as a member of the Western District Model Railway Club and we had … Continue reading →
The goal when I archive CDs is to get the best possible digital quality from my CDs and be protected against the loss of my collection. I don’t have as big a collection as many but I like most of … Continue reading →
Looking at a CD which only has only writing or an image but no background color you will be able to straight through to the reflective back of the CD. Thus if you hold the CD at just the right … Continue reading →
All modern hard drives come with SMART, Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, which in essence allows you to monitor the status of your disks and if they have any errors. This will often alert you to dangerous situations where you … Continue reading →
I have a OMV box with two disks in RAID 1, mirroring, with one disk failing. This post describes the process. Write down, on paper, the serial number of the failing disk. If you are like me all your disks … Continue reading →
In a perfect world I would spend my time between inventing great new devices and systems that inspire and revolutionize things and following up on hobbies like photography and movies. In the imperfect world that we live in I work in IT to pay the mortgage and food bill by creating and maintaining computer systems that make the world of business tick over.
