After recording a podcast with my friend Zig Zsiga on demystifying the role of the network engineer (https://zigbits.tech/70), I decided to record this companion series of videos. These are shorts explaining from my perspective the many roles played by a network engineer. You can watch the entire series in less than 30 minutes.
Freeze Your Credit Reports Before Identity Thieves Open Credit In Your Name
· 3 minutes to read
Published · Updated
There is no way to reclaim the information that the bad guys have. They’ve got my info. They’ve very possibly got yours. Data breach record dumps aggregated from many incidents are easy to obtain if you know where to look. Therefore, the issue isn’t how to get my SSN out of the hands of the bad guys. Rather, it’s how to control the situation to prevent lines of credit being opened in my name.
Vendor Lock-In. Maybe Not So Evil. (Video)
· < 1 minute to read
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Is vendor lock-in all that bad? Many argue yes. You’re tied to a vendor because you’ve used some of their proprietary technology, and so you’re (apparently) stuck with it forever, limiting your future business agility. I think that’s an incomplete argument, though.
You Can’t Do Everything, And That’s Okay
· 5 minutes to read
Published · UpdatedYou’re overwhelmed. You become inefficient. You juggle as many tasks as you can, trying to keep all the projects moving, but you spend more than half your time on administrative tasks around the projects. Meetings. Email. Vendor management. Status updates. You struggle to get the deep work done the project demands of your expertise.
It’s happened again. You’re in over your head, a victim of your own competency. It’s all too much. Despite this, your personality puts enormous pressure on yourself to perform, so you’re constantly anxious and short of temper. Your mind is a grim, emotional hellscape of extremes that leaves you and the others in your life exhausted.
What you’re doing is trading in quality of life for sporadic moments of acknowledgement from others. It’s a cheap trade leaving others with the benefits of your work and yourself a used-up mess. You’ve sacrificed physical and mental health and compromised interpersonal relationships…for what, exactly?
Finding Nuance In A Time Of Negative Noise
· 3 minutes to read
Published · UpdatedI’ve discovered a few folks having nuanced, engaging discussions that attempt to analyze the difficulties of our world honestly and thoroughly. If these sorts of conversations might be interesting to you, here’s what I’ve found so far.
Using AppleScript To Size A Window To 16×9 On MacOS
· 3 minutes to read
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As part of an automation workflow I’m building around Elgato Stream Deck, I needed a way to size an application window to 16×9. This would be one component of a workflow that would allow me to launch an app, size the window, position it on the screen, and hide all the other windows with the push of a Stream Deck button. The easy part was the Stream Deck configuration. The hard part was the AppleScript–I had never written one.
Synology Running Out Of Space? Empty The Recycle Bin.
· 2 minutes to read
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While performing end-of-year clean up on lab infrastructure, I discovered my 8 disk Synology array with about 22TB of usable storage was almost out of space. Really? What had I filled all that space with? After a lot of digging around, I found that I had enabled the Recycle Bin on one or more Shared Folders, but had NOT created a Recycle Bin emptying schedule. Here’s how to fix that problem.
Opting Out Of Toxic Culture
· 2 minutes to read
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When toxicity spills over into my timeline despite my best filtering efforts, my head goes to a bad place. I lose focus on work, finding myself instead brooding on the dark proclamations of the vocal bitter who wield hashtags as cudgels.