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TL;DR: Comcast had a local area issue. I set up a status page for my house after many outages. The status page actively monitoring connectivity forced Comcast to look outside our home for a fix after several visits. Forced switch to Comcast Business The pandemic hit, and our lives became 100% “virtual” last year. As a family that “cut the cord” years ago and I’ve been working from home for quite some time, our internet consumption was pretty high. Our neighborhood is only serviced by one provider, Xfinity (aka Comcast, one of the worst providers of them all). We were ever mindful of our Xfinity usage. The 50% emails before the halfway mark in our billing period made for some dining room table conversations about peak usage and devices. Once I fired up Red Hat Livestreaming, Xfinity’s data caps would be smoked within the first fifteen days of the month. We had no choice but to make the switch to Comcast Business to remove those caps. ...

Git submodules are cumbersome to manage. In my opinion, git submodules are a sort of anti-pattern for Hugo (I know many themes suggest using git submodules). There’s a better way to manage your Hugo site’s theme: Hugo Modules. Suppose you have a Hugo site and use a theme that supports Hugo Modules. I think the theme would need to require a minimum of Hugo v0.55.0. But, more features are available in later versions. Regardless, your mileage may vary: ...

Screensavers, you say? They’re more art than function these days. But, why not inject something either beautiful or useful into this mundane task of screen locking. Yes, it would be best if you still were locking your screen unless you want your four-year-old Slack messaging your co-workers. I have used a hot corner to the lower left to start my screen saver, locking the screen after a few seconds (if I accidentally trigger it). My screensaver will kick in after a healthy 10 minutes (I do work on multiple machines throughout the day). But, it’s a security practice you should never get out of the habit of doing. Lock your screen when you walk away. ...

History In the early 2000s, I did a lot of side hustle work around Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’d help clients with their search engine rankings. Back then, folks cared about all the search engines. Nowadays, there’s only one search engine people care enough to write about, Google. As Matthew Broberg so eloquently put on Twitter the other day, “Google is both the monopoly and trend setter. It’s a good target either way you look at it.” If you own a website and you care about it enough that you want people to look at it, do some SEO basics and add your site to the Google Search Console. ...

This article first appeared in DevOps’ish 210 and was 100% inspired by K Rain Leander The idea for the subject of this article came from K Rain Leander. Rain asks… “The past year has been one of lockdowns, increased security and decreased travel. DevOps became DevSecOps became DevSecOpsBiz. And the world embraced the work / life balance culture of DevOps. What are your favourite cultural shifts from the last year? What do you want to let go of forever? As we take a look at the latest updates in the DevOps world, also take a look at you and yours and let us know how you’re doing. And if we can help, let us know how.” ...