Updates to this article below. Order The ecobee3 with homekit is available at Apple Store, Amazon, Best Buy, ecobee shop, Home Depot, and Lowe's. Review If you have multiple members of your household that are home at various times of the day, then you likely have some familiarity with inevitable…
My household has an 8 year old T61P laptop kicking about that's running Windows 8.1 on a Samsung 840 EVO SSD (with RAPID mode enabled). It runs pretty well, even though it's stuck at SATA2 speeds. Tends to play the role of a temporary PC when a laptop has gone out for service. Right after upgrading…
Please note what been in TinkerTry's tagline, since January 2013: TinkerTry IT @ home Efficient virtualization, storage, backup, and more... So it's rather theme-appropriate for me to be happy to share that Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE is now generally available, download…
If you've followed TinkerTry for a while, you'll note that I'm a bit of an LED bulb fiend. Always on the lookout for an efficient 60 or 75 watt equivalent A19 bulb that has a CRI of 90 or above, a color temperature between 2700K and 2900K, and a price below $10. Yeah, I know, it's a tall order,…
During my month long stay in Germany recently, I drove about 2,000 miles on the Autobahn, with a lot of manual shifting. A Fiat 500L Diesel for 2 weeks, a Mercedes 8 seat van for a day (long story, exploring my half-German roots, and a Ford Fiesta for another two weeks. Yep, driving that little…
Our family's gZilla gaming system is based on an Intel Core i7 2600K and an ASRock Z68 motherboard, from mid 2011. This system started life hidden in our basement, with 2 video cables running up to the family room's 55" TV one floor above it, and to a 24" monitor next to the TV, where the…
I use a standing desk. Reasonable size and weight for my 3 monitors is almost as important to me as excellent image quality. Having had thousands of hours using my Nixeus NX-VUE27 these past 2 years (Close look at my Nixeus NX-VUE27 2560×1440 27″ monitor Aug 24 2012), I'm now able to offer…
Disappointing Aug 04 2017 Update - 3 years later, all within the last 3 months, trouble began. Two of my D-Link DGS-1024A 24 port switches started to give me issues, with networking stopping entirely two separate times. A quick power cycle recovered the network, but not my confidence. A few weeks…
This is not a sponsored blog post. My extended family has purchased 7 of the various PFCLCD models since 2012, and it's gone well, with just one battery replacement needed so far. I've found them to be very easy to install and configure at friends and family homes. Without a PC, and without a…
Available at homedepot.com: Cree 13.5-Watt (60W) Soft White (2700K) TW Series Dimmable LED Light Bulb (6-Pack) My quest for the "perfect" 60 watt light bulb replacement goes back a few years. Like many other tech bloggers before me, I find myself obsessed with finding cool-running…
I'm a long-time fan of the Cree6 downlights in my family room, serving our family very natural, dimmable light since December of 2011. Recently, when a bedrooom's old and dim 54 watt total dual-circline fluorescent ceiling fixture gave out, I replaced it with an affordable, semi-flush 3…
There are a few applications and emulators that suffer a noticeable performance impact when you leave the Windows 7 or Windows 8 Power Plan at the default "Balanced" setting. I use a simple way to change my power profile to "High performance" for just such applications,…
Like peanut butter and jelly. Spaghetti and meatballs. Bluetooth and headphones and yardwork. You know, things that go well together. Practical, efficient things that I have personally tested out. Useful around my own home, and paid for with my own money. There are some products that you might…
Short version, if you're replacing a ceiling fixture, consider heading to Home Depot if you live near one, or head online, to try: Qty 1 of $46.97 Progress Lighting Renovations Collection Antique Nickel 3-light Flushmount Qty 3 of $13.97 EcoSmart 13-Watt (60W) Warm White (3000K) A19 LED Light Bulb…
I have a lot of great stuff cooking, almost ready to be consumed. Hot off-the-press stories to expect this month include: SSD chosen to cache both reads and writes on a RAID5 array, under ESXi 5 (finally, CacheCade Pro 2.0 for the LSI 9265-8i RAID adapter, reliability and speed, NAS nirvana at…
You may recall my article 5 months ago, Save on an impressive LED Light Bulb for your ceiling fixture, TinkerTry.com/creecr6, and the story I told about finding a suitable dimmer for my LED floodlights/downlights. The Lutron SPDC-203P I already had was really meant for CFLs, and only lasted a few…
I had a really enjoyable dialogue with a TinkerTry site visitor recently, and I've obtained Mike's permission to go ahead and publish this, with some of my minor typos cleaned-up, and formatted so you can read from top to bottom. It's all about processor and storage choices when building your own…
Feb 28 2012 Update: Great news, with some patience and careful shopping, ~$200 USB can now get you 32GB of RAM that works great, given 32GB is what the free Hypervisor 5.0 supports maximum anyway, good deal! TinkerTry.com/32gb-memory-on-asrock-fatal1ty-z68-professional-gen3-motherboard I cannot…
I now have two fresh Windows systems on totally isolated internet connections, so within a week, I can finally take the time to record a new video of the complete process of how EXACTLY you configure the free, LogMeIn Hamachi VPN solution for for remote backups. Ideally, you do your full system…
All of these systems have a focus on energy efficiency, with few frills to needlessly burn up watts. Built for the long haul, to serve my family's needs for the next 3-4 years. And they're pretty much bricks if access is unauthorized (RAID encryption, HDD passwords, etc). The content here is…
The lovely Lenovo ThinkPad W520. All the details of what I crammed into this efficient Core i7 mini-beast. I managed to get 3 drives in, with 2.1TB of total capacity. And the 16GB of DDR3 RAM is running at full 1600 speed. The secret to all this was is the mSATA port, under the keyboard (see…
Mar 14, 2012 Update: For more pics, see also TinkerTry.com/gzillacompleted. For more backstory, see also tinkertry.com/boyobio. For boyo's new site, see boyostarcraft.com. Back when creating vZilla, I decided to standardize on this same motherboard I've become quite familiar with, for a gaming…
I recently learned that there may be some special considerations when shopping for a new, efficient, and properly sized power supply/UPS combination. I don't know for sure, but it didn't really cost me significantly more money, and I now know first-hand that my UPS seems to work fine with my…
EcoSmart E26 10.5-Watt (65W) LED Down light Light Bulb (CR6 by Cree) Compared to a traditional incandescent 65 watt flood lights, these LEDs pay for themselves in electricity savings in <5 years, and dim a little lower than the dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs, and put out far less heat than…
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technology in the IT Pro's home. My opinions here, not my employer's.
Paul Braren, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014-2019, Veeam Vanguard 2015-2019.
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Detailed Intel Xeon D and NUC specs at TinkerTry.com/compare
Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
