Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Trials and Tribulations

So, last week was a hoot. Just before Christmas I got a summons. No, not one of the “bad” ones, but a summons for juror service, which started last week. Yep, a couple of days after my nine-year anniversary of becoming a US citizen (6-Jan-2014) I had to appear in the El Paso County Combined Court as a prospective juror. […]

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Business loan scam lookalike?

Weird one this. For the past couple of months I’ve been getting emails to my work address offering business loans. Originally they were from one company called Capital Cosmos, which lasted until the week before Thanksgiving, and then suddenly they started coming from another called Club Capital. No matter the provenance, they’d both start off stating that the company I work for applied for a PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loan for some amount (and I hasten to add that I have no idea if this is true, not my department, etc) and would we be interested in a further business loan for $X, where X varies wildly per email. […]

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Interesting PayPal scam

I was surprised yesterday when I received an email from PayPal: “You’ve got a money request”. Wut? […]

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Zillow? Rightmove!

One of the fun things I do every now and then is to bring up Zillow to check on houses for sale in our neighborhood, as well as those which have sold. Gives me a pretty good idea as to house prices around here, whether prices are increasing or decreasing, how long it takes to sell them, as well as … who the heck decided that particular interior design was a good idea and looked amazing? […]

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My IoT problem: the garage door opener

About 18 months ago, the motor in our garage door opener died suddenly. Ok, so it was 20 years old, hence no real surprise in a way, and it was fairly easy to get around until someone came to replace it: just detach the chain from the motor, and lift the garage door up and pull it down. Move over, exercise coach at the gym! […]

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Windows Terminal is now default for console apps

Sometimes you just gotta laff. It seems that, as of Windows 11 version 22H2, the default for console apps is now Windows Terminal and not Windows Console. So what? you may ask. […]

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Default HTML files for subfolders with AWS

I have a set of static websites that I run on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and a bunch of sites that are essentially apps running on servers on Azure. The latter ones? No real issues, after all they’re written in C# and .NET which I’m kinda familiar with. The sites on AWS? Well, it’s been a hoot over the years. […]

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I’m done with PHP hackers

For a while now, I’ve been collecting statistics on requests made to this site that have resulted in 404 “Not Found” errors. The main reason was to make sure that I hadn’t inadvertently misnamed some file or hidden it so that readers don’t get what they were wanting to look at and read, but what instead has happened it that the vast majority of 404s are from script kiddies trying their hardest to hack into some PHP server code that I’m running. Such as WordPress. […]

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Tesla and Colorado Springs

I was chatting the other day with Paul Usher about the goings on in the UK and he suddenly veered off on a weird tangent. He’d heard a rumor that Tesla lived in Colorado Springs, which is where I live, and was it true? By that he meant Nikola Tesla, not the cars. […]

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I don’t have a website?

Like many of my readers I’m sure, I get scam texts trying to sell me something, or pretending to be some financial institution, or attempting to deceive me into doing something I don’t need to do. Me? Probably one a week on average, although of late I’m getting “Vote for Me!” type texts as well. Roll on November 8th when that’ll all go away. […]

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