TinkerTry Highlights 001

TinkerTry Highlights New tech evolves quickly, TinkerTry's agility reflects that reality My ongoing home tinkering tends to bring new insights to previously published topics. As I explained here, when the technical updates below articles are significant, I'm pulling together a curated list of those…

Oct 19 2016

TinkerTry Highlights 000 - Introduction

TinkerTry Highlights New tech evolves quickly, TinkerTry's agility reflects that reality My ongoing home tinkering tends to bring new insights to previously published topics. When the technical updates below articles are significant, I'm pulling together a curated list of those changes in this…

Oct 19 2016

HTTP/2 testing happening at TinkerTry.com, speed-up not currently available on Chrome (Fixed on Sep 20 2016, ALPN now implemented!)

You can confirm whether any page has HTTP/2 enabled by simply visiting KeyCDN's handy online checker: HTTP/2 Test Verify - HTTP/2.0 Support Cloudways Support Center - How to Enable HTTP/2 on Your Web Apps There's some risk of embarrassment here, as I reveal even more of the underbelly of…

Jun 17 2016

TinkerTry's .htaccess file for no www, no trailing slashes, and all https

I make no claims to be an expert in .htaccess syntax. Back on March 22, 2015, I quietly: changed from http to https (and dropped the www and trailing slashes) changed from WordPress CMS to Kirby Flat-File CMS changed web hosting providers for TinkerTry.com This article focuses is on that first…

Jun 27 2015

Try OPS1E on iOS, a fast and powerful way to manage your vSphere 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, and 7.0 environments

Yes, this is a relatively expensive app, but there is a free version to try. What if you could have a UI that is way faster than vSphere Web Client, that allows you do things like clone or migrate VMs, check in on CPU utilization, and even do vMotion, with simple tap-tap-tap ease of use. Yes, it's …

Mar 3 2015

TinkerTry Top 10 Most Popular Articles of 2013

Seems like the thing to do tonight, to reflect back on the sorts of stuff I wrote that people seemed to read, comment, and share with others. As a blogger, it's always interesting to dive into Google Analytics once in a while to see what's going on. It never ceases to amaze me how clueless I am…

Dec 31 2014

Fan Funding tip jar now available, over at the TinkerTry YouTube Channel

I was recently eating at a local burger joint. The two tip jars at the cash register are labeled "Star Wars" and "Star Trek." Makes me smirk, every time. In case you haven't looked lately, there's already 274 technical videos at the TinkerTry YouTube Channel, but the brief ads the…

Dec 3 2014

The infrastructure behind TinkerTry.com, including the hosting and CDN providers

If you've ever wondered what fuels TinkerTry.com, wonder no more. It's all right there, in the What This Site Uses link up above, at the very top of this site. I've collected the details of all the tech that keeps it all humming, for archival reasons too. After all, it's an ever evolving list of pr…

Sep 15 2014

How to fix Chrome as-you-type spell checking

Let's say you use WordPress editor, or other online web forms. Even if you don't use an Editor plugin like Tiny MCE Advanced, you can still have real-time as-you-type spell checking. You may find that the proper setting to enable Chrome's spell checking is turned off. If you notice that Chrome …

Jul 7 2014

Easy install Amazon CloudFront CDN with WordPress Plugin W3 Total Cache

I've used AWS (Amazon Web Services) CloudFront off and on over the last few years, always on the hunt for the best CDN. What's a CDN? Content Delivery Networks can deliver your WordPress blog's rich media (images, video) to the far corners of the globe, taking a lot of the heavy work off of your…

Jun 11 2014

TinkerTry's Third Birthday, June 1, 2014

It's been three years since launch already! Wow, time continued to fly by, fast, like my fingers at the keyboard. Yeah, I did say something like that last year, and the year before that too. But now, I've now published 447 articles total, over these last 156 weeks. The growing list of goodies in the…

Jun 1 2014

For any browser running on Windows, Ctrl+F5 forces reload from network, not cache

Your browser saves bandwidth by saving parts of web pages, usually to your hard drive, in a system known as cache. This ensures that identical content is downloaded only once. Sometimes, strange website behavior can make it necessary to bypass this cache, forcing your browser to re-download a web…

May 6 2014

On blogVault for a year, still happy with its daily backups of TinkerTry.com

This site has grown to 4.9GB of data. Not something you'd want to backup directly to my own home anymore, using something like SFTP, tying up my web host, and bandwidth, for hours. The blogVault WordPress Plugin connects your blog to the $9 monthly backup service. The first backup is full, and from…

May 2 2014

As webmaster, how I cleaned up after Heartbleed, including SSL certificate handling

Illustration above by Randall Munroe, with the full comic strip at xkcd.com/1354. See also preorders for his What If? book. April 9th 2014 got off to a rough start, with my phone alerting me about TinkerTry.com downtime overnight. Turns out my CentOS instance ran its usual overnight chron job to …

Apr 16 2014

blogVault, for scheduled daily offsite backups, and to restore, download, or migrate your WordPress site

. See also On blogVault for a year, still happy with its daily backups of TinkerTry.com May 01 2014 I started this WordPress-based blog called TinkerTry.com over 2 years ago. Like the dozen or so other extended family systems I'm responsible for backing up daily, my blog also needed a new routine, e…

Jun 20 2013

TinkerTry's Second Birthday, June 1, 2013

It's been two years since launch already, wow, time flies fast, like my fingers at the keyboard. Yeah, said something like that last year too. But I've now created 311 articles total, over these last 104 weeks. That's about 3 articles per week! The new 'Superguides' button helps with deeper dives,…

Jun 1 2013

WordPress Permalinks suddenly not working, here's one possible fix

Yesterday, I suddenly spotted some 404 errors at TinkerTry. Folks out there were searching for particular stuff. Their search engine was kind enough to spit out a direct link to one of this site's 276 articles. Often about stuff you won't find anywhere else. But after clicking on a link, visitors …

Jan 24 2013

TinkerTry.com 2.0

June 1 2011 to January 14 2013 January 15 2013 onward... Hope you like the new look and feel of all of TinkerTry, not just the new front page. The whole site has been reworked. Tried to avoid the redesign from being too jarring those already used to the site. With only about 75 minutes of downtime…

Jan 15 2013

TinkerTry's First Birthday, June 1, 2012

1st year Statistics: It's been a year already, wow, time flies. It would seem my fingers have been flying too, with 58,728 words typed so far. Yep, I guess I've written a book. In addition to the fresh screenshots above, here's some more Google Analytics data, from June 1st 2011 through March 31, 20…

Jun 1 2012

An analytical look back at TinkerTry 2011

One of the more fun aspects of blogging is the recent ability to access Google Analytics live data, for free. It's become clear to me, based on average page load times, that I have some work to do, as I resolve to do better in 2012! Knowing that many of my site visitors are also WordPress …

Jan 1 2012

Going to CES 2012! -- along with 2,700 exhibitors, 5,000 press/analysts, and 140,000 attendees)

On the recent BYOB Podcast, I announced that I'm going to CES 2012! Something I've wanted to do for about 20 years now. I'm also very happy I'll have the opportunity to meet David McCabe of homeservershow.com in person, and others from the tight-knit home server community like Mike Faucher, of the B…

Dec 19 2011

Overwhelming feedback lately is very inspiring, but I'm outgrowing email, help!?

Comments versus Emails: This was by far the biggest and most incredible week at TinkerTry so far, with a lot of comments, and a flood of email from all over the planet. More email than I can possibly reply to, actually. So, I politely request site visitors consider using a new site feature I'm…

Dec 8 2011

Reaching into the mail bag, here's a tasty sampler...

Below, you'll find some samplings of great stuff I received today, via email, that I've not had a chance to reply to. It's wonderful stuff, but I'm finding that requesting permission to publish the full contents of the emails is hit or miss. When granted, I then carefully remove the email addresses …

Dec 7 2011

You saw it here first, the new Windows 8 Unhappy Blue Screen of Death!

No, I'm not trying to be a news blog:  I'll get back to testing my new RAID array and installing graphics cards on my Z68 motherboard based vzilla shortly, worry not.  But sometimes I need to have a little fun, and I realize this claim may well be a bit of a stretch. It has come to my attention from…

Sep 16 2011