I recently ran into a peculiar issue after upgrading my vRealize Automation homelab to the new 8.3 release, and the error message displayed in the UI didn't give me a whole lot of information to work with: I connected to the vRA appliance to try to find the relevant log excerpt, but doing so isn't all that …

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I picked up an Intel NUC 9 Extreme kit a few months back (thanks, VMware!) and have been slowly tinkering with turning it into an extremely capable self-contained home lab environment. I'm pretty happy with where things sit right now so figured it was about time to start documenting and sharing what I've done. Hardware …

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It's a good idea to take a snapshot of your virtual appliances before applying any updates, just in case. When you have multiple vCenter appliances operating in Enhanced Link Mode, though, it's important to make sure that the snapshots are in a consistent state. The vCenter vmdird service is responsible for …

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There are a number of fantastic Windows applications for creating bootable USB drives from ISO images - but those don't work on a Chromebook. Fortunately there's an easily-available tool which will do the trick: Google's own Chromebook Recovery Utility app. Normally that tool is used to creating bootable media to …

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[Update 2021-03-12] This solution recently stopped working for me. While looking for a fix, I found that OpenVPN had published some notes on controlling the official OpenVPN Connect app from Tasker. Jump to the Update below to learn how I adapted my setup with this new knowledge. I recently shared how I use Tasker and …

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A few months ago, I started using the AccuBattery app to keep a closer eye on how I'd been charging my phones. The app has a handy feature that notifies you once the battery level reaches a certain threshold so you can pull the phone off the charger and extend the lithium battery's service life, and it even offers an …

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Okay, okay, this isn't actually going to be a comparison review between the two wildly-mismatched-but-also-kind-of-similar Chromeblets, but rather a (hopefully) brief summary of my experience moving from an $800 Pixel Slate + $200 Google keyboard to a Lenovo Chromebook Duet I picked up on sale for just $200. Background …

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I've written in the past about the Linux setup I've been using on my Pixel Slate. My Slate's keyboard stopped working over the weekend, though, and there don't seem to be any replacements (either Google or Brydge) to be found. And then I saw that Walmart had the 64GB Lenovo Chromebook Duet temporarily marked down to a …

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I was pretty excited to get WSL2 and Docker working on my Windows 10 1909 laptop a few weeks ago, but I quickly encountered a problem: WSL2 had no network connectivity when connected to my work VPN. Well, that's not entirely true; Docker worked just fine, but nothing else could talk to anything outside of the WSL …

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Do you (like me) find yourself frequently searching for information within the same websites over and over? Wouldn't it be great if you could just type your query into your browser's address bar (AKA the Chrome Omnibox) and go straight to the results you need? Well you totally can - and probably already are for certain …

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Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 was recently updated to bring support for less-bleeding-edge Windows 10 versions (like 1903 and 1909). WSL2 is a big improvement over the first iteration (particularly with better Docker support) so I was really looking forward to getting WSL2 loaded up on my work laptop. …

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I manage a large VMware environment spanning several individual vCenters, and I often need to run PowerCLI queries across the entire environment. I waste valuable seconds running Connect-ViServer and logging in for each and every vCenter I need to talk to. Wouldn't it be great if I could just log into all of them at …

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I've got an Ender 3 Pro 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a Pixel Slate. I can't interface directly with the printer over USB from the Slate (plus having to be physically connected to things is like so lame) so I installed Octoprint on the Raspberry Pi and connected that to the printer's USB interface. This gave me a …

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A friend mentioned the BitWarden password manager to me yesterday and I had to confess that I'd never heard of it. I started researching it and was impressed by what I found: it's free, open-source, feature-packed, fully cross-platform (with Windows/Linux/MacOS desktop clients, Android/iOS mobile apps, and browser …

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