Microsoft – What it is Good For

Microsoft has gone through a lot, and I've been with them for quite a long time, on and off. I became a MCSE in 1998, with a focus on Web, SQL and Exchange server. At the time we were in the battle for the backoffice, which was vs. Novell and Oracle, mainly, but also Linux ... Read more

Syncthing replaces Dropbox / GDrive

See also the local file sync tool FreeFileSync for handy local drive copying. Google Drive (GDrive) and other cloud storage alternatives such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive all have the serious drawback of keeping one's information in a third party cloud repository. Privacy and security are generally compromised this way, even when paying for storage ... Read more

DNS Records and Services

First, there are two kinds of DNS records: those for client look, and those for a server. Client Lookup - DNS Resolvers I don't trust Google DNS, though for a while it was the go to DNS, and easy to remember at 4.4.8.8 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. For privacy, for me, there are two options, with ... Read more

Open Source Cloud

The day has come when I have confidence it is possible to move off of all third party clouds, with the only exception being social media and social network sites. That is, the wonderful world of email, file sharing and synchronization, and even online document collaboration, can all be supported independent of third party services. ... Read more

How to Ditch Google Email

This is really about how to get off of Gmail/Google Email for Domains/Gsuite. It is not difficult to get off of Google Drive, and Google Photos, as well as Google Docs and Google Sheets, and the like. But there are certain advatages of Gmail/Google Mail, and the free version of GSuite, which I've been using ... Read more

Paypal vs. Stripe

Paypal Sucks Paypal sucks, as everyone knows. It has one benefit for the consumer (those buying with paypal) and that is their dispute resolution, which I've used perhaps ten times and have never lost. Dispute resolution with credit cards and banks is much, much more difficult and harder to win. For the seller, however, Paypal ... Read more

WooCommerce Paypal Settings

> Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of the international ... Read more

APT – Advanced Package Tool

APT -- Advanced Package Tool -- is all that is needed for most application installations when there are repositories which are regularly updated for packages of interest. Note that apt essentially makes irrelevant apt-get so there is no reason for that redundancy any longer. Note: Use aptitude when dealing with packages that have upgrade/downgrade issues, ... Read more

Delete Site Cache from Chrome

Chrome, why are you such crap at simple things? I need to delete the cache/cookies from a single website. It appears impossible these days. There is an odd work around, as follows: > Three Dots > Advanced > Content Settings > Cookies > See All Cookie and Site Data > {Search for site} > Remove ... Read more

WordPress – Soup to Nuts

I've written about WordPress at various points. I've been using this cms for 13-14 years, and for me it is well-known, though a bit worn out. The breakage it has has not improved much, and the resources needed are not up to the modern task. Essentially most performance gains are made through improvements in Nginx, ... Read more