My phone rings, I glance at it and contemplate answering. It rings a second time and I reach for the handset, then, just as suddenly as it began the ringing stopped and I was left in peace. I smiled to myself and continued what I was doing. No robocalls today! Bringing my phone into the Matrix Those of you who are regular followers of this blog will know that I have fully embraced Matrix as my chat platform of choice. While Matrix is a fantastic standalone product that offers exceptional features like federation, end-to-end encryption and the ability to self-host; Continue Reading
Internet Technology
Fun with FAXes
In my years of working in IT and technology I’ve never heard of anyone who considered dealing with FAXes “fun.” Most of the time my fellow sysadmins react to FAX tickets with either terror because they’re too young to have experienced the technology, or with absolute disgust as they remember the old-days of troubleshooting with buttsets, tone generators and termination blocks. Nevertheless, one day when digging through a box of old electronics I found a USB FAX modem, and decided to see if I could resurrect this old technology get it working in a modern environment. So what is a Continue Reading
A review of Starlink Internet
It was a weekday afternoon when my roommate messaged me “you have just received a large box.” I could barely contain my excitement as I meandered through the rest of my workday, because I knew what that large box contained! After many long months of waiting my Starlink starter pack was here! For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few years, Starlink is Elon Musk’s pet project to launch a satellite-based Internet service by leveraging a constellation of thousands of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. The service promises to deliver multi-megabit speeds to Continue Reading
Taking Back Control of my Messaging with Matrix
Back in the olden times when you wanted to send a message to someone you mailed them a letter. Remember those? Real pieces of paper which contained actual writing and were physically delivered to someone. Time progressed and advancements in technology gave us the ability to send messages electronically, there was FAX then email and SMS. All of these communication methods had two things in common: 1. They were decentralized and interoperable; that is to say anyone could send a message to anyone else with the right equipment, and 2. You were ultimately in control of the message history. In Continue Reading