jeff.wheeler.blog

Financial rags have been critical of Lowe’s performace as compared to Home Depot. They’re right to compare the chains, but fail to understand the underlying reason for Lowe’s poor sales growth and other technical shortfalls. The worst has yet to come. Lowe’s new CEO, Marvin Ellison, is prioritizing cost-cutting and stock buybacks instead of investing in the business. This is a short-term strategy that will not only be unsuccessful, it will deeply damage the chain’s long-term prospects. ...

Most people I work with have used OpenSSH but aren’t too familiar with its features. It’s got a lot of creature comforts! It also has powerful security features some people misuse by mistake, and that’s dangerous! There’s no real TL;DR here, but if you need the highlights: use ssh keys to avoid typing passwords into servers all day use ssh-agent to avoid typing your passphrase all day use ProxyJump or ForwardAgent to avoid copying your secret keys onto jump servers use HashKnownHosts so your ~/. ...

I’ve migrated my blog from the Ghost blogging software to another program, called Hugo. I’ve used Ghost for some time, but it is missing features (like syntax highlighting) that are important to me; and they aren’t even on Ghost’s roadmap. The sooner I ditched it, the easier it would be. Software Choice I looked at Hugo and Jekyll. There are plenty of feature-by-feature comparisons out there, but the TL;DR is: ...

Recently, I was involved in discussion about good MOPs – Method of Procedure documents often generated to plan work on networks, power systems, etc. I said generated to plan, but in reality, this is not what happens in most orgs. MOPs become a box-ticking chore that actually subtracts value from the company by creating work with no gain. This is bad on two levels; it wastes your time, and it misses all the benefits of what should be a helpful planning tool. ...

Verizon’s marketing campaign to convince its subscribers to sign up for Verizon Up seems relentless. They’ve sent me push notifications on multiple devices. They’ve emailed me until I unsubscribed from their emails. They’ve shown me ads on their web site. The Verizon Cloud app repeatedly insisted I commit to Up until I finally blocked the app itself (hope it doesn’t need to notify me about anything useful!) I’ve complained to Verizon through social media about this. ...

There’s been some speculation about powering 2016 - 2017 MacBook Pros with 60-watt Thunderbolt 3 docks. Most users have nothing to worry about, but I’d like to put that speculation to rest. Allow me to show you some graphs. The 2016 - 2017 MacBook Pro 15” ships with an 87-watt USB-C charging brick. The Apple Store offers just one Thunderbolt 3 dock – a Belkin model with a 2-star rating after 27 reviews. ...

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is planned for release soon. I’m looking forward to the inclusion of an upgraded openssh-client package. It will finally support the ProxyJump feature, which gives you an easy way to configure ssh to connect by way of jump hosts. It’s been available on Mac for years. # $HOME/.ssh/config Host *.example.com ProxyJump j@jumper.acme.com:12345 In today’s world of perimeter security, mergers & acquisitions, moonlighting, and defense-in-depth networking, you may find yourself doing several ssh hops to get from your workstation to a target host you need to inspect or manage: ...

I think Spectrum is incorrectly billing many of its telephone customers. It looks like a mistake caused them to do it in a way that deceives customers and may violate regulations. Spectrum may owe some customers a refund. Let me walk you through it. Today I looked over my cable internet/TV/phone bill, as we should all do more often. As a customer recently affected by Charter/Spectrum’s acquisition of Time-Warner, I was pleasantly surprised by the new bill format. ...

The toughest thing about migrating to macOS is replacing all those little productivity tools and utilities you used every day on your previous OS. Here are some that I find essential and worth recommending: Everyday productivity tools: Kiwi for gmail; turn gsuite into a desktop app Marked 2 markdown previewer The Clock world clock; very helpful for planning activities with remote teams google music Desktop Player because I didn’t choose browser-tab-life Programmer / coder / have you seen my stapler: ...

To really be in the MacBook Pro cult, you need a keyboard with the right symbols etched onto it. Also, I used a PC keyboard with my Hackintosh for a year, and was still confused about which button was ⌘. If your requirements for a keyboard include Mac key caps, there are surprisingly few options. The first keyboard I’m trying is an Azio model. Azio’s marketing indicated tactile feedback but without the clickyness. ...