Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Split Home Networks

Lately there have been numerous reports of devices bought for the home rife with security vulnerabilities which expose the user’s home network to external attacks. For example, Baby Monitors are often constructed in the cheapest manner possible by those who have no real understanding of security. Sometimes these companies demand that a bad review on Amazon pointing out such vulnerabilities be turned into a good one. The list goes on and on.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, August 18, 2016

iTunes Music Skipping in Background

In one of the El Capitan updates, I had issues where iTunes playback would start skipping when the CPU was under heavy load. I noticed that if I brought iTunes to the foreground, the skipping stopped, but if the heavy CPU load application was in the foreground, it resumed. Being a developer, this meant that my music would continually skip whenever I compiled something, which is a common occurrence. I was able to conclude that App Nap was the culprit and disabled it.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, June 2, 2016

FreeNAS Internal Backups

I’ve changed my media storage system from the Linux setup I outlined earlier to FreeNAS. In the process of the transition, I built an entirely new server using a Norco 4224 as the case and a Xeon processor with ECC. Since FreeNAS makes ZFS so easy and doesn’t suffer from several of the problems of ZFS on Linux, I elected to use this OS for my storage going forth. The only issue I had to resolve was how I would handle backups.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, December 28, 2015

Yosemite Install Can't Be Verified

This weekend, I noticed that the spinning hard drive in my MacBook Pro was dying. I ordered a replacement, installed it, then proceeded to install Yosemite. After counting the numerous Yosemite installer bugs, I noticed an unusual one: This copy of the Install OS X Yosemite application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading. My searches for this didn’t yield a useful solution so I figured out what the problem really was: Since I disconnected the battery as part of my install process, the computer was completely without power for a moment and loss the date/time.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, February 20, 2015

Not All Packets Are Equal

The term Net Neutrality covers a lot of hotly debated topics but at its core is whether ISPs should be allowed to treat some traffic differently. In the midst of the discussion, one minor fact seems to have been lost: Not all packets are truly equal. Around 10 years ago, I had DSL with 768kbps down and 128kbps up. I quickly learned that if I did any upload at all, the download speeds suffered greatly.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, January 22, 2015