I bought Eli his first gun, a Daisy Buck Model 105. It is very similar in function to lever action rifles (lever action works the same, cross-bolt safety is the same) so it’s a great starter gun to teach proper firearm handling and safety. It was $18 at Walmart but has quality where it counts. … Read more
Happy World Backup Day! Here’s a quick little Ansible Role I wrote to automate backup configuration for hordes of servers using Rdiff-Backup from an Ansible inventory file. If you have no idea what I just said you may want to skip to “I’m Confused” at the very bottom of this post. What does the Rdiff-Backup … Read more
“These scissors don’t work, can you pass me yours? Thanks. Hmm… these don’t work either. Did they work for you? They did?! How did you get them to work!” It is embarrassing to be the only kid in class who doesn’t know how to use scissors. Although it was odd that these scissors didn’t … Read more
What Is a Rubber Dome Keyboard? Take a look at your keyboard. Push a few of the keys. It probably feels mushy, and it’s most likely a rubber-dome keyboard. These weren’t made for typing, they were made to be cheap. You have this dome of rubber that the key sits on, as you press the key feels … Read more
Beauty in God’s creation. Sunday morning I walked outside to see all my trees covered in small inch long gravity defying icicles. But they’re not icicles. Click on the images to get a larger size. Touching one they’re more like snow than ice. I’m not sure if this is hoarfrost or rime. It melted away … Read more
Merry Christmas! In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. … Read more
Happy 500th Reformation Day! The Reformation did not begin with Luther. Rather it can be traced back as far as 1200 A.D. with Peter Waldo (who was forced to live in hiding), then John Wycliff (labeled a heretic), and John Hus (who was burned at the stake). All these men realized the Roman Catholic Church … Read more
Can you recommend a laptop? It’s one of the questions I’m asked several times a month… and I realized I should just write a guide. So here are some options I think are great and things I think you need to consider before buying a laptop: Business Vs. Consumer Laptops Most brands have at least … Read more
Ben’s Law: within a 4 hour block of time, for each unit of uninterrupted time in hours (t), the value of productivity and creativity is roughly t^2. An interruption resets t to zero. p = t^2 c = t^2 if t = 1 (1 hour of uninterrupted time) then p (productivity) = 1 and c (creativity) … Read more
FreeNAS 11 introduces a GUI for FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor. This is a potential replacement for the ESXi + FreeNAS All-in-One “hyper-converged storage” design. Hardware Hardware is based on my Supermicro Microserver Build Xeon D-1518 (4 physical cores, 8 threads) @ 2.2GHz 16GB DDR4 ECC memory 4 x 2TB HGST RAID-Z, 100GB Intel DC S3700s for … Read more