The XPS Work Light can be added to the DeWalt DWS779 Miter Saw to add functionality normally found on the DWS780. Various tutorials are on the internet show how to do the upgrade for around $70 by installing the light, a power supply, and replacing part of the handle. This post reviews how to do the same modification for around $30 using the XPS Work Light and a battery pack.
5 years ago, I decided to buy a starter home, knowing that I planned on getting married, starting a family, and outgrowing the home within 5-7 years. Pretty much everything went according to plan; I got married, had a kid, and sold the house just over 5 years later. All in all, I saved $47,435 by buying vs. renting, which worked out to an average savings of $777 per month. This post explores the real costs associated with owning the home, and compares them to what it would have cost to rent a similar home.
Today, Google announced that it is killing the free control plane for GKE clusters, except for one free zonal cluster per billing account. Let’s look at the timeline of events (source: release notes archive):
This post explores how Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), which were introduced at v1beta1 in Kubernetes version 1.8 and v1 in 1.16 have been used & abused, and killed the free Kubernetes control plane.
I’ve been working with .NET Core lately and am really enjoying C#. I was interested in finding out more about how to increase RPS in a backend web environment. Some online research shows that .NET threads are heavy, and that .NET uses M:M threading, so the OS will do the context switching between threads. This is especially concerning in a web application because I/O intensive operations such as Database and API calls will cause threads to block and use up system resources.
The development world is quickly making the shift to Docker and microservices, and every day I feel like I’m running more Docker containers. My daily laptop is an Macbook Pro (Early 2015), but I’ve recently had the chance to test the Dell XPS 15 (9550) as well. In doing so, I got to wondering what the performance penalty for running containers through a Virtual Machine (such as Boot2Docker or Kitematic) as opposed to running on Bare Metal Linux.
PHP 7.0.0 was just tagged yesterday, and I was interested to see if it could live up to the performance claims that Zend made. Yii2 is my PHP framework of choice, so I built PHP 7.0.0 from source, stress tested one of my application’s pages, and compared performance to PHP 5.6.4.
The maximum acceptable levels here for web performance are PHP 5.6.4 serving between 75-100 RPS at between a 31ms-176ms response time and PHP 7.0.0 serving 175 RPS at a 47ms response time.
PHP 7.0.0 does a very nice job here- about 2x the performance for serving Yii2! It seems that it is definitely worth upgrading.
Buzzfeed recently released a quiz that has been getting a lot of attention on my Facebook news feed, titled “What State Do You Actually Belong In?“. The quiz consists of 12 sets of 12 questions and then produce an answer of a state that you supposedly closely identify with. According to Buzzfeeed, I belong in Minnesota, which is far too cold and obviously incorrect, so I decided to do some digging to figure out how their quiz system works.
To view the states that Buzzfeed assigned to each quiz answer, view my What State Do You Actually Belong In Revealed (PDF). To see how I created this file, continue reading…
Recently I was programming in the Yii Framework and ran into a situation where I wanted to use INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE in an Active Record. In my research, I discovered that this is specific to MySQL. In my case, this was still be a valuable requirement for my Web Application and was worth extending Yii to get working. My approach was as follows:
In the past few years, an interesting new option has arisen in the Music Industry – the option to purchase music “As A Service” is now extremely popular through services such as Spotify, Google Play Music, etc. I instantly fell in love with Google Play Music All Access and needed a way to play it in my car through my HTC One (M7) Android cell phone. I decided to upgrade my car stereo to the Alpine UTE-42BT Digital Media Receiver. Here’s my review after spending 2 months with the Alpine UTE-42BT.
In my quest to bring my vehicle’s audio system up to 2013 standards, I started out with a search at crutchfield.com with the criteria of Bluetooth Playback and no CD Player. My specific use-case is playing Google Play Music All Access over Bluetooth through my HTC One (M7) to the Car Stereo. The search returned a few “Digital Media Receivers” (DMRs) and the first unit that I ordered was the JVC KD-X250BT. Here’s my review after spending a month with the JVC KD-X250BT.
