Turned on the Austin TX weather radio WXK27 just in time to hear an unusual message: Public Information StatementNational Weather Service Austin/San Antonio TX117 PM CDT Thu Jun 5 2025…NOAA WEATHER RADIO OUTAGE DUE TO A SOFTWARE UPDATE NEXT WEEK…The Austin/San Antonio National Weather Service office will be conducting a required, scheduled update to their …
Author Archives: Shawn
VLC Recent Albums Flow
I use VLC on Android to listen to music because it’s kinda neat. My one annoyance is that it doesn’t have anything like the Recent Albums cover flow like Plex does. Really annoying. I pick up a lot of music and really miss being able to look at my recent CD stack to remind myself …
Kill All Serial Scrapists
Yesterday, I saw this site was timing out with HTTP 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) and I couldn’t access my WordPress blog. Whut? I logged into my shared hosting shell, looked at the server logs, and saw I was being hammered by some scraper bot. So of course Apache’s mod_security was throttling my site and returning …
F.U.M.
In Neal Stephenson’s epic sci-fi novel “Cryptonomicon”, we read of a character in one of the modern timelines who is a techie and a new business owner. This guy has a running gag where he has an app he wrote that sits in his PC’s toolbar that checks his bank accounts and his investments and …
Oops! All Side Quests!
Work has me exhausted; I can’t work fast enough to finish one project before two tasks, three manager questions, and four support requests come in. So much context switching, and I lose time and energy. So much energy. The stack keeps deepening. People ask me, “Hey Shawn, why don’t you play games to unwind?” “Well,” …