crome-plated

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2018, everyone! Here’s hoping to a happier, healthier, less chaotic year, filled with more kindness, love, and understanding than the world saw in 2017. Airline flights are a good source of downtime, and have historically been a great time for me to brainstorm and reflect, and today’s flight from Chicago-Midway to Charlotte was no exception. I now have an ambitious and aggressive roadmap for this year, both personally and professionally, and it includes everything from Dancer improvements to new service offerings and products.

Screen Locking in High Sierra

Friday Grab Bag

Happy Friday! Here’s a healthy dose of randomness to start your weekend: The iOS 11 update is pretty nice so far, especially for iPad users. However, the battery usage on my iPhone 6s seems to have increased significantly. Has anyone else noticed this? PostgreSQL 10.0 has been released! Check out the announcement. AOL Instant Messenger will be discontinued on December 15th. It’s the end of an era. The Perl Dancer Survey 2017 is online.

The Importance of Security Updates

We are almost all universally guilty of it. Whether it’s that iOS update on your iPhone, or the Windows Updates you have been sitting on for two months, we are all guilty of not updating our computers and devices when we should. The problem is that we are every-increasingly becoming targets of cyber attacks and cyber fraud, and by not staying on top of our updates, we are unnecessarily exposing ourselves to increased risk from these attacks.

Good Times/Bad Times

It’s been a long and frustrating road, but I have finally resolved the touchpad issues that have plagued me for seemingly forever in Linux. By installing libinput and using it in favor of the Synaptics touchpad driver, the touchpad sensitivity issues that have often plagued my sessions of heads-down programming have come to an end. On the flip side, however, the latest kernel build for Dell/Ubuntu 16.04 has destroyed Bluetooth support on this laptop.