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Review: Feit 48ft. LED Outdoor String Lights
Recently my neighbor has been redoing his backyard and I saw that he put in low voltage lights around the perimeter of it. This made me a little jealous as I only put in low voltage lightning under parts of our deck and not around the perimeter. While I do have floodlights in the backyard, they are for security lightning and not really lighting the backyard when we use it. So, my choices for adding lights were quite limited.
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Setting up an EdgeRouter Lite for an On Demand iOS VPN
Ever since I started my career, I've used Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to connect to a company network. My first experience is with AppleTalk Remote Access and I thought it was neat to be able to have my home computer on the work network. Over my career, I've used VPNs mostly as a user as I had no use for one as a home user.
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10 Years of Storing Receipts Electronically
Just about 10 years ago, I got frustrated trying to find a receipt and embarked on storing all my receipts electronically. At the time, I couldn't find a Mac application to do this, so I wrote my own called ReceiptWallet, now called Paperless. I started scanning in just about every receipt and stored the receipts by year. This may seem quite excessive to many, but I've found that having easy access to receipts is invaluable.
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EdgeRouter Lite and Namecheap Dynamic DNS
For years, I'be connected back to my home network when I was away for various reasons. As my home network is on a residential cable modem, the IP address of the network is not guaranteed to remain the same. While it remains the same for long periods of time, I don't really want to take the risk of the IP address changing while I'm not home and not being able to access the network. The solution, of course, is Dynamic DNS (DDNS) where you run a small client on a machine that is running all the time that monitors the external IP address and then updates a DNS provider when it changes; the DNS provider uses a short TTL (time to live) to guarantee that the cached DNS entry doesn't last too long. For years, I've run SecuritySpy which has a built in DDNS client that connects to a service that the company runs. This has run flawlessly for me; I setup a CNAME DNS entry to point to the DDNS entry so that I can use a name that I remember. The CNAME lookup usually works fine, but I ran into a problem this weekend where it was causing problems for a VPN client. So, a quick search turned up that the registrar I use, Namecheap has a DDNS service that is already built into their DNS dashboard. Since I already use their DNS, setting up a DDNS entry took a few seconds.