I was in “Just make it work” mode and found I’d left my credentials out in plain text after setting up my Plex server to read off a remote fileshare. Don’t do that, instead, do this: Create a directory on your local linux machine where you’ll access the file share: sudo mkdir /media/PlexMedia Modify /etc/fstab and add the following: //remoteservername/fileshare /media/PlexMedia cifs uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,credentials=/etc/cifs-creds 0 0 Now you need to create the credentials file:

Disabling TLS 1.0 is required to pass PCI scans. I’ve done this before, and it’s fairly trivial in most cases, but when I disabled it on my e-commerce server, VevoCart started complaining. The UPS shipping estimate web service call failed, as well as our credit card processing system (which I didn’t find out about until later). The outbound call to UPS fails because it defaults to TLS 1.0. The simple workaround was to use disable TLS 1.

There’s a lot of information out there on how to use Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to build and publish to Azure websites, but not a lot on using Web Deploy, so here it is. First, make sure you can successfully publish to Web Deploy via Visual Studio, because that’s what VSTS will use. Take note of the name you use - you’ll need that in your VSTS Build step.

The final post in a 3-part series showing off some tech I recently added. I thought it would be cool to walk up to my MAME arcade cabinet, say “Play Pac-Man” and magically have that game start playing…so I did that, sorta. I have to press a button for it to start listening, but hopefully I can remove that and have it “always listening” (muhaha). Here’s a quick video showing it in action, with my awesome 7-year old assistant If I say something like “Play Mortal Kombat”, MAMEIron will recognize that there’s more than one Mortal Kombat, and pop up a menu with the various flavors of Mortal Kombat (1, 2, 3, 4, Ultimate MK3, etc.

The second post in a 3-part series showing off some tech I recently added. I wanted the cabinet lights to turn on when I walked up to it so I ordered some goodies from MadeInTheUSB.net (They sell a bunch of components that plug in via USB, and can be controlled via C#). Before I continue, I have to plug this company because of the amazing service I received. I wasn’t sure exactly what I needed, but after exchanging a couple emails, I placed an order.

The first post in a 3-part series showing off some tech I recently added. I wanted the arcade to “turn on” whenever someone walks up to it, so I wired up my MAME front-end, MAMEIron, to the webcam. Whenever someone comes into view of the webcam, or it senses a change in the environment (like a light turning on), the cabinet will “turn on” by fading from black into the front-end, with a little boot-up-sequence sound effect :)

I’ve been hesitant to seal up my cabinet because I had a major hurdle to overcome. My monitor. I have no way to turn it on without pressing the power button. Well, (I’m embarrassed to even admit that I hadn’t checked long ago), the monitor will remember its on/off status if I kill power to it. This doesn’t really make sense to me, since it has a momentary type switch (as opposed to a regular on/off switch), but whatever…I’ll take it.

Ransomware is all the rage these days. The bad girls/guys live off the profit, AV companies try to prove their worth by blocking the latest variants, and the media reports on its proliferation across the country¹. There’s a couple positive side-effects of its apparent success. Corporations getting hit by Cryptolocker, Locky, and Cerberus, to name a few, are likely testing out their data-restoration policies. Lots of companies take backups - only a fraction of those actually restore them.

If you use Fiddler (on Windows), it will set your proxy settings to http=127.0.0.1:8888;https=127.0.0.1:8888. If, for some reason, it doesn’t shut down cleanly, it might not undo that proxy setting, and your internet will cease to function. At first I just rebooted, but I still had no web access. I could ping 8.8.8.8 so I knew I had connectivity. I could ping www.twitter.com, so obviously DNS was resolving. The proxy setting was the next thing I checked, and there it was, mocking me: