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Continue reading →: Dominion Strategy
Well it’s Christmas Eve, so a great time to play board games (and watch Lego Movie :-), so just a reminder on how to do a quick lesson on a deep game, Dominion: Big Money/Smithy. Probably the easiest thing to teach, is basically to buy a Smithy and money and…
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Continue reading →: Seagate Enterprise Capacity decoder ring
Ok, a little nerdy but we ordered some SAS drives and I was surprised that we got the V3 older Constellations. It is incredibly hard to figure out the right drives, but in looking at the Seagate data sheet I can see why, there are so many different models. And…
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Continue reading →: Real life debugging with ASRock Z97m OC Formula and ASRock H97i
OK, somehow we are buying mainly ASRock boards these days, some hard won tips, tricks and traps: ASRock H97i This is a nice non-overclockable board for about $100. We are using it for our basic machines. The main things to note are: The m.2 slot is on the back and…
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Continue reading →: Ubuntu 14.04 with ZFS and SMB sharing
Wow the documentation for this is so confusing mainly because most of the google things don’t cover how the latest release of Ubuntu actually works. The good news is that many things are now automatic. So to cover the tricks and traps here; Ubuntu file sharing via SMB This actually…
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Continue reading →: Unifi UAP-AC Zero handoff
How frustrating, one of the cool things about Unifi and their older product line is how they manager zero handoff. This is needed because most clients are stupid. They hold on to a wifi signal for way too long. What you want in a good environment is for there to…
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Continue reading →: DIY CNC
Got a great kit from makesmith as part of my Kickstarter addiction. It’s a do it yourself CNC machine. You just need a dremel and it can cut nearly any soft material. But you need to supply your own Dremel. Popular Mechanics has a good review of what is technically…
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Continue reading →: ASRock Z97m motherboard confusion
Motherboard vendors have so many identical motherboards and it is so hard to tell what does what. Asrock for instance has four nearly identical Z97M motherboards. Only with a detailed comparison can you see the difference: Z97M OC Formula and the Fatality are both $135. There doesn’t seem to be…
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Continue reading →: Best price for MacBook Pro Retina
It sure is complicated figuring out which sites have the best price with complex discount and other structures: Appleinsider is a good place to start with very reputable vendors and it shows that for a MacBook Pro Retina that the prices have tightened up a bit. We got our last…
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Continue reading →: Wifi network buying guide for December 2014
Inspired by reading all those Tom’s Hardware reviews, if you need to upgrade your hardware and can’t wait for full 802.11ac Wave 2, then here are your options. Smallnetbuilder.com seems to have the best reviews of these things. Most of the big sites don’t cover this in too much detail,…
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Continue reading →: Home Security Systems
The state of the art is in such transition here. The future (e.g. Nest) seems pretty clear. Everything should be IP based, we get out of these incredibly high fee driven systems (although Comcast and AT&T are both trying to monetize). This is a great example of how current systems…