Last week at work we experienced a major performance hit in one of our (SaaS) applications. We use New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software package which flagged SQL as the culprit. One of our clients had started a training class with ~30 people…something we should normally never notice. We’ve onboarded tens of thousands of new users without batting an eye. Something was definitely sideways, and it was time to dig into SQL to find out.

TL;DR My security cameras were sending video to China. The following is how I found out and stopped it. # A while back I bought some Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) security cameras and a Network Video Recorder (NVR). The setup was pretty easy - plug the cameras into the NVR, install the app on my phone, and link them up by either scanning the camera-specific QR codes, or hand-typing the codes as shown on the NVR monitor.

Every year my coworkers and I (and all of our families) attend ThatConference. It’s a family-oriented tech conference in Wisconsin, and it takes place at a gigantic water park. If you haven’t heard of it, you absolutely have to check it out. I’ve been going since 2012, and I can’t say enough good things about it. About a week before the conference this year, I thought It’d be cool to connect with other people who are interested in MAME.

This isn’t a “What is Docker?” post; you can find those everywhere, written by people who understand it, and can explain it, much better than I. This is a quick & dirty “get-it-running” primer. A Docker image consists of a “base layer” (usually a slimmed down version of Linux, or Windows) and software additions/modifications layered on top. I’ll use Jenkins as a working example. To download the Jenkins image from the Docker store:

We bought a new Lenovo Yoga 700-11isk laptop a couple years ago and kept having problems with it charging. We went through 2 AC adapters, and even replaced the charging port. It suffers from a poor design that causes the charging port to become loose over time, and ultimately stop charging. After the last round of AC brick and charging port replacements, it worked for a while (~6 months) and fell victim once more.

The other day I came across a StackOverflow comment so valuable (and, unfortunately NOT marked as the answer), I had to share. First, a little context: I was debugging a webapp and popped open Fiddler to check some HTTP requests. Unfortunately, the site uses HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) and was greeted with Chrome’s warning page letting me know that I couldn’t view the site. HSTS prevents man-in-the-middle shenanigans, which was currently being introduced by Fiddler’s SSL cert

A few months ago we upgraded to Charter’s Business-class internet - basically the same 60Mbps residential service but with a static IP. When the tech finished the install, I plugged my laptop into the cable modem and was pulling down almost 70Mbps! I powered everything down and put my hodgepodge of network stuff back into place. Everything was A-OK, or so I thought. From the top - EdgeRouter X, Netgear FVS336G, security camera NVR, and a Netgear switch.

After several iterations of MAME Front-ends, I think I’ve landed on something I can call “Done” (for now!) History 2006 I used MameWAH 2007 I wrote my own front-end in VB.net, based on MameWAH (before it was open-sourced) 2010 Attempted a GPU-accelerated Silverlight front-end 2011 Created WomPF!, a WPF front-end with a rotating game-selector 2014 MAME Iron was born when I scrapped everything and rewrote from the ground up in C# 2016 MAME Iron becomes motion-activated with voice-recognition 2017 Scrapped everything again and rewrote from the ground up in WPF, this time with a focus on UI as well as UX.

I picked up a TV wall-mount bracket from Menard’s for like $6. The bracket has a handy built-in bubble level and I attached it to a 2x4. When I attached it to the sides of the cabinet, I only used one screw on each side (at the top of the 2x4) at first. This allowed me to hang the monitor on the bracket & pivot the 2x4 until I was happy with the angle that the monitor was sitting at.

I struggled installing Private Internet Access’ vpn in Kali a few different times using their Linux installer, and decided to share the super-simple way I got it to work. Make sure you have your /etc/apt/sources.list file populated with the correct values. These are the ones I used deb https://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free deb-src https://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free apt-get update apt-get install network-manager network-manager-openvpn network-manager-gnome network-manager-openvpn-gnome edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and set managed=true (in the [ifupdown] section)