Aruba 2018 travel

Aruba 2018 travel
My annual vacation posting. This year’s trip was to the island of Aruba one of the Dutch Antilles islands (the other major ones being Bonaire and Curaçao) . I’ll keep this short as there a tons of travel blogs out there that do a much better job of providing a more complete review of an ...

instead of UBI, why not Universal Basic Housing (UBH) plus social support?

instead of UBI, why not Universal Basic Housing (UBH)  plus social support?
So UBI  (  universal basic income ) is one proposed solution to dealing with growing wealth inequality and coming demographics and social changes that will make the notion of the 1950’s capitalistic “hard work” untenable in heavily automated world of tomorrow. BEME youtube video on UBI of course as the video above points out there’s ...

West Point Triathlon 2018 recap

West Point Triathlon 2018 recap
Here’s  my West Point Triathlon 2018 video recap. Rather than a race report blog posting I decided to do a video edit of the race.  In brief, I’m disappointed with my performance especially on the run.  But there’s always next year. Anyways, see how it unfolded from my perspective.. * westuit legal/worn

Northern Portugal (Alto Minho) / Drone video & photos

Northern Portugal  (Alto Minho) / Drone video & photos
Just a quick post about finally getting around to editing my April 2018 Portugal visit with family.  Brought the Mavic Pro along and here’s an edited version of some of the sights from the trip  Monção, Portugal . Here are some additional photos taken on Monção, Portugal a small city, on the banks of the ...

PHP on Linux authenticate users with a Windows Server Active Directory 11

PHP on Linux authenticate users with a Windows Server Active Directory
A common request when building INTRANET web applications is to have users use only one  common shared set of  login credentials. Typically in most small and medium businesses this means that logging into a Windows Server of some kind to access the network.  Windows Servers use Active Directory (AD) ,which is  basically Microsoft’s glorified LDAP ...

Magic5 Swim goggle review 37

Magic5 Swim goggle review
This is a short review of my experience with the Magic5 Swim goggles. Magic5 goggles are custom made , custom-fitted goggles that promise to transform the age old issue of leaky and ill fitting goggles into a perfect leak-free  fit. Leaky goggles are the bane of anyone who spends enough time in the pool or ...

Donut Media coolest youtube Car channel

Donut Media coolest  youtube Car channel
This is a  short post, I came across a neat little youtube channel Donut.media, which is an awesome car channel , To quote their tag line “Making Car Culture.. Pop Culture.” Here’s a typical episode: Its a very slick and nicely produced channel that not only highlights popular makes and models in their “Up To ...

Easy battery powered Mailbox Door IoT sensor using ESP32 36

Easy battery powered Mailbox Door IoT sensor using ESP32
This post is how I took my rusty (literally) old mailbox and made it into a battery powered smart mailbox (an IoT device) , that sends you an SMS  (text messagE) or MQTT alerts, and in the process  how I  learned about Arduino and particularly  the ESP32 chip which lets us relatively easily  setup with minimal ...

Running Mosquitto MQTT on Windows 10 super easy 26

Running Mosquitto MQTT on Windows 10 super easy
So I’ve been playing with IoT lately,  using platforms such as  Arduino ,ESP32, Raspberry Pi and when it comes to being able to have these devices communicate with a hub or server, the de facto standard is to use a MQTT  server and protocol  . Unfortunately, prior to Windows 10  finding a  native Windows  version is ...