Years ago, REALTORS kept paper lists of all the listings of houses for sale in a given area. Then came the MLS, the multiple listing service, a database of all listings nationwide. In order to be listed in this database, you had to engage with a real estate agent for your transaction, thus keeping a sort of “good ol’ boys club” for real estate transactions. You had to pay to play by their rules to buy or sell a home….
I stopped using paypal about 10 years ago because of an instance where they randomly decided that my account was suspicious and froze my account balance. I never got that money back, they just kept it. Recently I had a bunch of things to sell on eBay and it turns out that by default they just accept money via paypal. I did not realize this, and of course everyone paid me via that method. I was unable to spend the…
I currently have a Samsung Galaxy Note9, which has been fantastic so far due to the long battery life, excellent camera and Android Auto. The other day my phone started warning me that it was going to upgrade, and I couldn’t prevent it only delay it. It was telling me how great the new Android 9 was compared to Android 8 and then one night it upgraded while I was asleep. Since then I’ve had several problems. Major Problem #1:…
About 4 months ago, I was looking for a new lead generation method for my IT company, and I came across LinkedHacker. The idea seemed good, reach out via LinkedIn to people to make a connection, then send them a non-spammy message asking if they would like to hear about your product/service. They promise 10-20 leads per week on their website and I thought that seemed like a great number of leads for the small price. Using their math, there…
A few years ago (back in 2014 I believe), I read about a new drone that could follow you while you wear a transponder. It was called AirDog. It seems to be vaporware (not real yet).
I have been trying to post a negative review on Zillow about my experience with a mortgage broker, and the broker objected to my review to zillow because it was such a bad experience, and now Zillow keeps rejecting it. Which makes me wonder how many other times people have tried to post negative reviews and been denied. Since I am not sure zillow will keep the review, I am posting my own review here of Thomas Bepko and Total…
For years now, I have been receiving robo-calls for someone I’ve never heard of, with seemingly no way to make it stop. I get an operator, explain that I’m not him and they claim they take me off the list. Only for the calls to start again from a different collections agency!
The newer Extreme Networks XOS has a nice auto-secure sort of feature when you first set them up that locks down several things, one of them being SNMP. I was trying to add some X440G2 switches to Cacti and was having trouble enabling SNMP. These are the commands that seemed to work.
One of my hobbies is embedded electronics. I was thinking of how cities/municipalities/etc pay a lot of “meter maids” to go around and ticket parking offenses, and how it really should be automated. This way you could eliminate most of them (but not all) and increase revenue at the same time. Of course if you park at meters you probably won’t like this prototype I’ve made.
Back in 2009, I used to own a laundromat. It was a self-service unattended laundromat that was still coin-op, no card system. I wanted to know how much traffic my laundromat was getting, to see busy times of day and get some metrics without having to be there. Thus spawned a little invention of mine, the laundromat watcher.