Technology


Setting up multiple WLANs in DD-WRT 14
Even for the extremely ungeeky, having WiFi available throughout your house is pretty much standard these days. And while the next logical step of securing that network via encryption (WEP is for n00bs — those in the know use WPA2-AES) may not be standard, it really should be. Assuming you do […]

Use DD-WRT to Create a Guest WiFi Network and Block ...


APC RBC2 87
The concept of “planned obsolescence” is nowhere more visible than in the battery backup (or UPS – Uninterrupted Power Supply) market. With the insane prices the manufacturers charge for batteries, it’s easy to compare it to the video game console industry: the companies must barely break even (or maybe even […]

Dead UPS Batteries? There’s a Cheaper Way!


Remote Cable Modem and Router Power Cycle 2
We’ve all been there. You try to load a web page, or check your email, or download a file, and nothing happens. “The Internet’s down!” is the cry at my house when we lose connection. It’s also the #1 reason why people call their Internet service providers’ tech support numbers, […]

How To Automatically Power Cycle Your Modem and Router on ...



Arris TM822G Cable and Telephony Modem 79
To lease, or not to lease. That’s the question for anyone who gets their high speed Internet through Comcast Xfinity. Literally millions of Comcast customers (over 18MM, to be exact) are paying an extra $7 per month to rent a modem from the cable company, and if you’re unsure whether […]

Review: Arris TM822G DOCSIS 3.0 8×4 Ultra-High Speed Telephony Cable ...


BlueFusion by Scoche 6
My wife’s been nagging me gently reminding me that she wants to be able to listen to her iPhone’s music library in her 2008 Cadillac Escalade ESV. Combine that with her patriotic respect of the law and love of automobile safety (she’s never got a ticket, and her first one […]

Review: Scosche BlueFusion Bluetooth Car Kit




Postfix 2.9 Upgrade 6
I’ve previously written a how-to for compiling Postfix from source on a CentOS 5 box. I recently tried following the same steps on a CentOS 6 box, to upgrade from Postfix 2.6.6 which is installed by default. I’m glad to report that the same instructions will work just fine to upgrade […]

Building Postfix 2.10 on RHEL6 / CentOS 6 from Source


Yahoo and Postfix 26
If you’re getting “temporarily deferred” Postfix log entries when trying to send mail to Yahoo! that look like this: host mta7.am0.yahoodns.net[66.196.118.34] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.0 [GL01] Message from (xxx.xx.xx.xxx) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-21.html or status=deferred (host mta7.am0.yahoodns.net[66.196.118.35] said: 451 mta1336.mail.bf1.yahoo.com Resources temporarily unavailable. […]

How-To: Postfix configuration to reduce Yahoo temporary deferrals using Transport ...


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I’ve been noticing some wonkiness with the admin area of our WordPress blog at CheatCodes.com EXTRA!. Through some experimentation, I noticed that all of the issues went away if I put CloudFlare into Development Mode. This, however, isn’t a long-term fix, so I decided to create a CloudFlare Page Rule for […]

Fixing WordPress Admin Issues with CloudFlare Page Rules



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This is one of those blog posts that’s almost 100% for my own benefit, since twice a year I have to fumble around with my phone system trying to remember how to adjust the clock to and from Daylight Savings Time. Of course, this would be easier if I knew […]

How to Adjust the Clock on a Panasonic Hybrid Phone ...


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As you may be aware from one of my previous posts, I decided to ditch both of my analog phone alarm companies in favor of digital monitoring using my Envisalink 2DS adapter which connects my DSC alarm panels to my in-home networks and, along with a host of other features, […]

How to Disable Phone Options on a DSC Alarm Panel ...




Just in time for the holidays, CheatCodes.com has launched a mobile-optimized version of their video game cheats website. As with the mobile versions of many other popular sites (such as Facebook and Google), you can access the mobile version of the website by putting an “m” in front of the address: http://m.cheatcodes.com/ […]

CheatCodes.com Goes Mobile!


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As part of our preparations for winter, my wife gently reminded me last week that she’s been asking me to fix the gas fireplaces in the house for months. But as a geek’s geek, I can’t just fix a fireplace, I have to upgrade a fireplace! We have three gas […]

Review: Skytech SKY-5310 Fireplace Remote Control


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I often say there are only two types of data: data that is backed up, and data that is waiting to be lost. Even if you’re the most contentious hax0r who always backs up your data, if your backups are stored in the same physical location as the source data, […]

How to Back Up a Linux Server to Amazon S3 ...



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I’ve written a number of posts about the Ecobee Smart Thermostat since installing my first one in 2010. Since then, I’ve received a number of comments and emails asking if I knew of any discussion forums for Ecobee users. I didn’t, so I decided to launch my own using Google […]

Ecobee Discussion Forum for Owners, Installers, and Enthusiasts


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One recommended way to help secure your Postfix mail server is enabling TLS (Transport Layer Security) for connections to and from Postfix. You can search for more detailed descriptions of exactly how TLS works, but basically it’s a crypotgraphic protocol that allows connections between systems to remain secure. It relies on a key […]

Configure Postfix TLS with a Free StartSSL Certificate




Amazon CloudFront 7
I found a great post by Clay Loveless who wrote a PHP script to batch invalidate files files on an Amazon Web Services CloudFront distribution. You rock, Clay. Amazon doesn’t even let us do that (yet?) via the AWS Mangament Console. Until now, when I wanted to manually invalidate a […]

Simple CloudFront Invalidation of a Single File via HTTP



Google Favicon 4
If you try to access the URL of your favicon.ico directly (http://example.com/favicon.ico) and your browser opens a “Save As” window instead of just displaying it, then your Apache isn’t set up to properly deliver the .ico file type. Add this line to your httpd.conf file: AddType image/x-icon .ico Don’t forget […]

Favicon.ico not loading? Add an AddType



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This is one of those blog posts that’s more written for my own benefit to refer to later than for the benefit of the Web-at-large, but if someone else happens to stumble upon it and it helps you out, then cool. 🙂 I had to migrate a Fedora box (the […]

How to set up two NICs on different subnets with ...


DKIM Test Message 145
For those who want or need to compile and install OpenDKIM from the source code, you can follow the instructions I wrote in this article. If you’re looking for the fastest and easiest way to get OpenDKIM running on a RedHat or CentOS system, I currently maintain the OpenDKIM package in […]

Installing OpenDKIM RPM via Yum with Postfix or Sendmail (for ...


ecobee Firmware Update Screen 4
I’ve already discussed most of the pros and cons of the product in my ecobee Smart Thermostat review, and detailed my experiences with installing a second ecobee unit and using the group features. I’ve also documented some of my frustrations with ecobee’s tethered device approach, especially in the rare cases when […]

Installing Ecobee Smart Thermostat #5