Teknoviking

Its amazing what you can do with some duct tape, an old 12volt fan from a power supply and 30 minutes of time. Felt like I got back to the basics today when our Unity Voice Mail server died.
The internal fan in the Proliant Server that runs the County voice mail system went bad and it [...]

I am definitely a child of the TV age, distinctly remembering watching the Apollo 11 moon landing from our black and white set in the living room. I discovered my love of SciFi movies and shows in the 80s with Star Trek and Dr Who.
So, it was with some trepidation this week that I canceled our cable TV subscription. On Tuesday [...]

Well, that was exciting. Our hosting provider lost connectivity between the website and the database. All seems to be working now though!  On to the rest of the week.

Well, I am impressed with my upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS). I really loved Karmic but this distro seems even better. I must admit that I do miss the earth brown tones in Karmic, the purple theme is just not really me. I’ll have to see if there is a way to use the 9.10 [...]

I am not a web designer, but I enjoy a little coding now and then. Last year I built Jess’ website (jesshartley.com) using the open source project, Joomla. It came out very nice despite a bit of a learning curve, mostly due to Joomla’s specific nomenclature. Once I got through those concepts, it has turned [...]

Spent a bit of time last night out in our back yard with the telescope enjoying the crystal clear skies from this altitude. We have the most amazing night sky here. The only place I have ever been that was more impressive, was the heart of the Mojave Desert in winter.
At times the clarity is so dramatic, that you [...]

I have been tinkering with some small simple robots from  a wonderful book  called “Junkbots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels”. They are easy to build and lots of fun to play with. They are cool on a completely different level than my first generation “Lego Mindstorm” gear and I am really enjoying the scrounging, found art-aspect of the [...]

When we moved out from the Commonwealth and I took the job here at Cochise County, the bigest challenge that I faced was turning the department around. It had a poor reputation throughout the county as an insular non-partner and  very poor service provider. Moral was shot and everyone was either rowing in a different direction, or not rowing [...]

Today I dumped the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (9.10) on my Lenovo S10 in favor of trying the Moblin 2.1 Beta .
I did the install from a DVD and it went very smoothly. The only thing that doesn’t work out of the box is the Wireless due to the S10’s Broadcom Drivers. You can however find a pretty [...]

Spent most of Sunday  night back and forth to our microwave/radio hop up in Mule Mountain updating some routers and testing some new connections with ‘topher. The weather came in really strong and we went from about a quarter inch of snow, to nearly four inches in just a few hours. Driving was exciting to say the [...]