I recently listened to Triangulation episode #278 with Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants (which I'm currently reading). Tim, and Leo, both stated in the podcast that getting people to pay for content is hard, which is why advertising supported content is so prevalent. Here's some of the content I willingly pay to consume: Apple Music ($14.99 / month) - Ad Free* Apple Match ($29.99 / year) - Ad Free AT&T U-verse (just the television portion, $90/month) DirecTV Now ($35/month) Audible Membership ($16/month) - Ad Free* iTunes Movies (we own over 100 titles, including Top Gun) Washington Post New York Times MacLife Consumer Reports Popular Mechanics Simple Habit (Meditation) AllTrails (Hiking Trail Maps) Hulu...

I'm a big fan of the Ubiquiti UniFi networking gear, I wrote about how I was able to use their gear to provide micro-segmentation of my IoT devices from the rest of my network. However, one area that Ubiquiti really falls down on is internal DNS resolution of DHCP hosts. This is a problem they've had with their UniFi Security Gateway (USG) for quite some time, as documented here. Basically, however your device identifies itself to the DHCP server on the USG is how it will be inserted into DNS. If there's a space, then there's a space (and resolution will fail). There is no where to configure a default domain name (search domain) and if you use a Fully...

Back from my break over the holidays! Back to work, son is back to school. I didn't publish any articles over the break, but that doesn't mean I wasn't working on one! Back in January, 2010 (7 years ago now), I published an article on my frustration around Intuit's Quicken product, and specifically the lack of support for the Macintosh platform. The article got a lot of publicity and I ended up writing a series of articles on the state of Macintosh Financial Management software. The most recent article on the topic was published in February, 2011 and discussed my final decision: Quicken for Mac was dead and I moved to iBank (now called Banktivity). Well, it's now 6 years...

I recently read the following blog post post by Matthew Sag, "One More Sign World Is Shrinking – eBay is for Suckers". It compelled me to tell my story as well; though mine isn't as clear-cut as Matthew's, it's another example of the Buyer-is-always-right-no-matter-what mentality that eBay has taken in recent years. Unfortunately, eBay is now a marketplace for people selling esoteric items that you cannot find elsewhere (at huge mark-ups) or re-packaging things from Walmart. I'm not sure where I'll sell my occasional items at this point, I'm not a fan of Craig's List (where people that believe Garage Sales charge too much), but have tried Let's Go (and sold a few items). I'm open to suggestions. My...

Time flies when you're having fun! I'm really happy to be back in Silicon Valley after returning from Calgary (and Edmonton). Nothing like being back, getting up in the morning to a crisp 50º and going for a walk. The last week was relatively quiet as the year is winding down. This past week I published two articles: Cable TV Providers are in Trouble (my experience with Apple's new TV application for Apple TV, and a realization that if the Cable providers continue to put up barriers to accessing content, they'll soon find themselves bypassed) Serial - Driverless Serial Terminal Emulator for macOS (a long-overdue review of the excellent Serial written by Chris Kent, if you use USB serial adapters...