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I have been on a tear on social media channels and more specifically on my Google/Opentable reviews when it comes to merchants and restaurants incorrectly using of so-called convenience fees. The problem lately is everyone is starting to do it because they THINK...
This past weekend and the subsequent days since have literally been a roller coaster of emotions. It has ended up resulting in not only the single worst vacation to date, but also created such a blast radius of mis communication, mis interpretation, and...
Just about 8 weeks ago, as many people may know, I went in for surgery to repair my left distal bicep tendon. Back in 2022, I was lifting a sheet of plywood in Lowes and ended up with a “high grade partial tear”. I won’t go into the mess that followed of “just let it heal”, but suffice to say it didn’t heal...
Recently, Cloudways announced the new release of their Autoscale solution for WordPress. Naturally as a Cloudways fan, I wanted to try it out so I signed up for the public beta. The idea behind such a solution for WordPress honestly is the first I have seen. Most folks have been used to running WordPress on a single or shared server, and I have...
I have sparked a lot of interest with the home lab and tech community about the use of CloudFlare Tunnels and CloudFlare Access. These offerings have a great potential for people like me and others as well as legitimate use for enterprises. That being said, I put on my “what if” hat and decided to think about this from the other...
The other day I posted about CloudFlare Tunnels which has gotten a bit of interest around the community. CloudFlare Tunnel on their own are “good” because they allow you to publish an external routable hostname without opening firewall ports and port forwarding. As I have had to address on Twitter that is only PART ONE of the secure...
Last week I was chatting in the OMBI Discord channel about CloudFlare in general and someone turned me on to the use of their free tunnels. I was not sure what it was all about so down the rabbit hole I decided to go. What became fascinating to me was how useful they can be for your self hosted web apps. Traditionally we know you always had to...
Late last year I had a new project for STK Promotions to build out this new store for Peacemaker Project 703. As part of that build we setup a new domain which also meant needing to setup new mail senders from the store. Well, really we needed more than that and I took the time to ensure that over a few weeks I got DMARC properly setup and...
Just over a year ago I wrote about a trip to Champaign Illinois to visit a friend who lost someone in the line of duty. The experience was humbling for me to say the least. In light of all the things going on in the world, for me the Police are still important people. The death of Chris Oberheim hit a lot of people but not as many as his wife...
As my Plex setup and my Home Theater have evolved I am always looking for new ways to improve the usability and function of the combined experience. I actually did this a while back and just now got to documenting it, but the requirement I had was to operate the lighting based on Plex Media Player actions like Play/Pause. My idea if all the...
Today I got an unusual call (not a text) from Verizon Wireless, which frankly never happens, so I decided to let it go to voicemail. What I learned after the caller left the message is something I wanted to share so that others can learn from this and hopefully Verizon Wireless can do something about the scammers that are getting much...
I’ve been a major fan of Plex since someone got me on the kick a few years back. Anyone that knows me my setup is no joke. One of the best aspects of the entire infrastructure is Ombi which is so well written and useful it’s amazing it’s open sourced. This tool provides a portal for users on my Plex server to make new requests...
It seems I have had a number of the same conversations in recent weeks about a very particular topic, and some could argue a design flaw, with the most basic of VMware vSphere deployments. This has to do with using an overly simplistic deployment whereby the ESX host is only configured with (1) VMKernel port, primarily VMK0. While this...
I woke up today, in a sense, hating myself. I’m going to disclose something only a handful people knew about 8 months ago when I wrote the post below. Today was to be my last day. My last day working in technology. My last day on any and every social media platform. My last day for a lot of things. It was to be my first day on a new journey....
James St. John, CC BY 2.0 
