Posts made by WingCreative

Gumroad is a bit nicer for selling digital products because it's all built into the platform - I think you could use Stripe to process the payments, but you would need to set up the store yourself? Not 100% sure.

Edge also had some trouble with antialiasing last time I tried it out, it made my avatar look like a janky jumble of pixels.

Outside of compatibility issues with a few web apps, and a general lack of extensions, I have been really enjoying Edge so far - it has been quick to load, and I appreciate the interface's simplicity.

With that said, I default to Firefox because it has all the extensions I like already set up, and outside of NoScript fiddling I don't need to mess with any compatibility options.

Chrome is okay, it's what I use at work, but it can be a bit too much of a memory hog if I'm trying to look something up while alt-tabbed out of a game or something.

I ran into this issue today. Ever since they tried to make it "more user friendly" it has stopped working, I guess?

I was trying to show someone how to sync their OneDrive for Business folder and it just stayed at that screen indefinitely. I ended up having to use the online version of OneDrive instead of actually syncing it...

@JaredBusch I know, right? Based off of the few blog posts I've read, this seems like one of those projects that a developer built for themselves, then thought "oh I might be able to make some money off of this too... I dunno, $50 per person sounds about right?".

My only caveat for this is that I want to inspect the source code with a fine toothed comb before actually using it in production - It will both hold client data and transmit payments, so there's a lot at stake in terms of security.

I have never understood why macs were so popular for school computer labs etc. Glad to see Chromebooks becoming a "mainstream" choice in the place where they make the most sense IMO... should make them easier for IT departments to pitch if "everyone else is doing it".

@dafyre said:

It would be nice to see a free vs paid feature list as well... The Anchor App appears to be a completely separate application. They both look super cool though.

Ask and you shall receive!

I came across Duet yesterday and was pretty impressed by the demo.

I've been trying to think of a way to have a client portal where they can keep track of invoices, task lists, and all that good stuff. Then Duet comes along and is like "here's all of that for a reasonable one-time fee". The developer also has a free, stripped-down version for just managing invoices and such but I went ahead and bought the full project management version. I figure the one-time cost will be offset by potentially not having to pay for a Harvest subscription anymore.

I haven't had a chance to try installing it myself, but it looks like you just need a basic Linux webserver stack. I'll be trying it on a VPS within the next week or so, and will try to remember to document the process. I do eventually want to tweak it to use Stripe Checkout instead of stripe.js, but that should be fun to try and figure out and the developer provides full access to the source code upon purchase.

I thought you all might be as interested in a self-hosted project management solution as I am!

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this, sounds like a really interesting idea!

Especially since I've been wanting some hands-on experience with Scale hardware...

My day started off with a failed RAID controller and hasn't really improved since.

I've made some progress on my post-vacation ticket backlog but days like these make me wish I weren't ~75% of the IT department where I work...

Speaking of progress, I beat episode 4 of Life is Strange on Monday night and am already replaying it in anticipation of episode 5. Definitely blows all other "make choices and see the story change"-type games out of the water IMO.

Ever since I changed my gravatar for this site, it has been interesting to see how many places actually use gravatar as a source for default profile pictures... I started using New Relic a few days ago and found my little logo in the top right corner automatically, and the same thing just happened to me in Slack...

I want to believe that someone was handing out cheese as a promotion for their new line of mice.

"Hypervisor" is one of those somewhat ridiculous tech words that I'm happy to be able to say in serious, real life situations.

It sounds like something out of a 90's sci-fi movie.

Got a call within 5 minutes of being at my desk this morning, it's something I need to troubleshoot at another site.

Get to the site, start troubleshooting, find a solution and oh the power goes out on the whole block.

Thankfully the "surprise UPS test" succeeded and we were able to gracefully shut servers down without issue.

Power comes back up, people immediately start powering their computers on and trying to log in despite the fact that it's come back up and gone out again a few times already. Get confirmation that the power company techs have resolved the issue, power the server back up, tell people their computers will work now, solve the original reason I had to jet over, and GTFO.

Got back to the office just in time for lunch! That's one way to make a Friday go by quickly...

Not going to lie, recently I have been using a private Trello board for ticket tracking and it has been working flawlessly so far in my week of testing.

My goal was to implement a ticketing process into our system here to better track IT's time and recurring issues. Budget of $0, and I'm not a fan of Spiceworks' unwieldy help desk solution.

Trello's interface is a nice mix of powerful and quick - I can jot down an issue reported to me in the hall as a card, then sit down and flesh out the details of the ticket later like due dates, checklists for each action, and so on. Bonus: I don't need to set up a VPN to my internal network to do that like I believe I would for the SW app.

You can even set it up so that anything sent to a support email address forwards messages into an "Unassigned" list on your ticket board. Our current implementation doesn't do that as it was decided we would try and start recording tickets without formally putting in a "no ticky no worky" policy, but I can manually forward relevant messages to my board or specific cards.

One precaution I've taken while I'm still getting my feet wet with it is not writing down specific server names in the tickets, and using a simple cipher for workstation names... it's a cloud solution and, while SSL is used for data transmission, they don't encrypt data at rest so those names could be in the hands of bad guys in the event of a data breach. Probably a bit paranoid/security theateresque of me but I figure it can't hurt.

I'll reiterate that I've only been using it for a week, but what a glorious week it has been!

I think we're in the last generation of "We NEED MS Office because of its features" and are moving into the age of "We CAN'T use Office because it sucks to work with online and/or it costs way too much" unless Microsoft catches up in a big way soon. Google's successful Chromebook push in the education sector means that there's going to be a significant portion of adults in the next 10-15 years who grew up with effortless online collaboration being standard. Heck, my alma mater switched over to Google Apps for Education about 3 years ago... I joined the IT help desk shortly afterwards, and everyone that mentioned the switch to me was incredibly happy about it.

In comparison, I've tried to get people to use Office Online but all of the apps are just different enough to provide a sort of Uncanny Valley of features and UI that seems to make people anxious to use it. I have to provide training for anyone who needs to use the online version, showing them where things are because it's all almost - but not quite - in the same place as the desktop application. And then there are the small Microsoftisms throughout that bog people down, like the fact that you have to click "edit document" to actually do anything to the document besides look at it. That tiny User Experience glitch in particular has been a pain point for every single person I've trained... and I feel a bit evil telling people to use Office Online instead of Google Docs, which they already know how to use.

I am hoping the bulk of Office 2016's new features focus on improving online collaboration. Based on Windows 10 it appears MS is taking big steps on integrating internet services into the desktop experience, and based on this article that's what they plan to do with Office 2016 as well... but given their current implementation, I'm going to have to see it myself before recommending it to anyone.

@Nic said:

Apparently a whole chunk of Amazon cloud stuff wasn't working over the weekend. Maybe that's still impacting things?

That would be my guess as well assuming the service in question is hosted within the US East region. Their status page says it's all good now, but I bet they still have some kinks to work out.

Just got a cold call from someone offering hosted PBX services (among other things).

By the end of the call the latency on their end was making it almost impossible for me to understand what they were saying.

I decided to pass on their offer...

Perfect timing to read about delicious things, I just hit lunchtime

Right now I'm extremely happy I decided to get everything up to date on my biggest client's web server + site last night as part of installing Imagick, because I just read about a big wave of WordPress infections going around. So yeah NoScript up if you head to a site with WordPress!

I'm going to call it now and say this outbreak is probably due to an outdated plugin (probably one on this list) that has been packaged by theme developers on marketplaces like ThemeForest... which means most of the vulnerable/infected sites have no free way of fixing their vulnerability.

This kind of thing is what happens when developers get rights to package their themes with a certain plugin, but customers of that theme don't get rights to update it...

I'm also a big fan of this hypothesis because it means my websites aren't vulnerable and my theme elitism is worthwhile! But we'll see how it develops I suppose.