Flightgear Flight Simulator
I rarely take time to play, but last week I had 30 minutes before I had to leave for an evening class. I'd been working hard all day and needed a quick break of fun before going off to more brain usage.
I decided to check out Flightgear Flight Simulator. It's a bit hard with the keyboard, but I was at a buddy's house and he let me borrow his USB joystick and it was so easy, just like flying a real plane. No thinking about keys to press, just all pretty natural.
Free SSL Certificates
If you have your own domain, like roysdon.net, you may at some point want to be able to login to a webpage, receive and send email, transfer files with ftp, and even connect to your own network with a virtual private network, or vpn. You'll want to do this securely so you know no one is watching your login authentication or data that you're transmitting.
Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is the means to accomplish this. Then you can log in from a PC and trust that your authentication and data isn't going to be intercepted or modified on the way from the PC to the server.
In order to use SSL you need at least one SSL certificate. While you can create an SSL certificate and self-sign it, the rest of the world will not trust it, and it'll cause error messages about being untrusted.
The important step here to have the rest of the world trust your certificate is to have your SSL certificate signed by a Root Certificate Authority, or Root CA. Root CA's normally charge for this service, but you can get a CA-signed SSL certificate for free.
Serial port redirection to console in Linux
There are times when keyboard and video monitor access (KVM) is not always accessible or scalable. Serial port redirection to console is a way to be able to access hosts before booting the OS in Linux.
I will discuss 3 different steps that are needed to accomplish this in Linux.
Website Gotchas 101
So you want to make the leap on to the interwebs, I mean webtubes. You want something bigger than your FaceSpace, err, MyBook page. You know those social-thing-a-ma-bobs, right? But you don't have big enough pipes coming to your house? What do you do?
You can pay someone like Hurricane Electric $1/month to host it (or GoDaddy, GKG.net, and hundreds if not thousands of others out there). But how do you choose? Here's how:
IT Geek Breakfast @ Huckleberry's, Modesto
"IT Geek Breakfast" at Huckleberry's is back on again for March! Saturday, March 13th, 8am. I've set up a Facebook Event to RSVP at. After last months success, we set up a Facebook Fan Page for IT Geek Breakfast so that we can centralize announcements.
This is a get-together breakfast of some Christians who work in the IT/IS/computer field (or are just hobbiests/enthusiasts!) so we can fellowship.
Everyone (non-Christians friends too) are welcome. But the topics will probably be highly geek/technical in nature, and probably boring for non-technical spouses.
