Amazon accounts for over 50% of all e-commerce in the United States [source] and with that comes a whole lot of deliveries. During COVID, world shopping quickly went “online”. We can have food, other groceries, and everything else under the sun delivered directly to our doors nowadays, but that means someone has to bring it to us. Even if Amazon does eventually nail down their drone delivery service, long-haul truck drivers and delivery drivers will still be a needed workforce in this apparent digital online ordering world. With more delivery drivers on the road, companies and normal drivers may want…
Author: Justin Vendette
My house is full of smart home automated tech that would make someone from ten years ago be stunned at what I can do from just a phone in my pocket. As great as the plethora of home tech can be, it does come with countless headaches, issues, and IT troubleshooting. Sometimes basic and simple really can be better. With new homes coming with a front primary door and a rear entry door, it can be helpful to have a doorbell installed to a door that isn’t the front door and spending tons of money for a wired video doorbell…
X-Sense 3-Pack SC07-W Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm Overview It was only a few years ago when I moved into my first apartment and then eight months later need to move out due to my above neighbor catching their garage on fire. Luckily, I wasn’t home at the time, but the smoke and damage from the fire caused great valuable losses. If only their garage had a smoke detector to alert them of a raging fire, then most of the damage may have been suppressed by a fire extinguisher. Fires in homes are devastating and carbon monoxide can be deadly;…
When migrating a MDS model from one database (or server) to another, the MDS Deployment Tool may report that the input mask is not valid. Input Masks in MDS represent the data-type of each field; think of a cell datatype in Excel. Each Input Mask is represented in the SQL database under the [tblList] table. This lists the available Input Masks available to users in MDS. To my knowledge, the only way to add Input Masks is to insert them into this table. During the migration of an MDS model using the Deploy Tool, the tool will attempt to check…
Remove DevOps Server or TFS On-Prem User Locks In the situation where a user no longer works at the company or a file has a phantom lock on a DevOps Server/TFS repository, administrators may undo the lock on the repository or file in question. This guide was created for DevOps Server 2019, but should continue to work on older Team Foundation Server installs. 1. Install Microsoft Visual Studio from the Official Download Page. Visual Studio 2019 was used in this situation. 2. Install the matching copy of Team Explorer for the previously downloaded Visual Studio client. 3. With both tools…
Performance of gas without the noise, fuss, and fumes – An Ego Power+ 24in Snow Blower Review Back in March of 2021, I bought my first house here in enjoyable-summer, yet cold-winter Wisconsin. After I got settled in, around August, I knew it was only a few months until the aforementioned cold-winter Wisconsin was about to begin. On average, my town in Southeastern Wisconsin receives about 45 inches of snow each year. Granted not all of this snow sticks or accumulates on the ground, but there are often a few days when 2 – 5 inches are expected to land.…
Spectrum/Time Warner Cable Outlook Email Setup with Pictures If you’re like me, you may still be using an email from your internet provider for some legacy online accounts and/or services. While ISP provided emails are convenient, people have heavily transitioned to online email providers such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. Even though I’ve transitioned most of the accounts, I need to maintain my old Time Warner Cable email address in my Outlook for the one-off emails it receives. I thought this would be a straightforward thing, simply add my account to Outlook and be done with it, but Spectrum, who…
Breathe Clean – A Bagotte HEPA Air Purifier Review In the continued years of the coronavirus, we’ve all, hopefully, have become to accustom a cleaner and healthier lifestyle. Over the past year we’ve, as a collective, learn to wash our hands, clean our areas, and keep distance between total strangers. As government entities have us believe, the coronavirus is to be transmitted through air particles from speaking, sneezing, and coughing. It’s the whole reason they’ve been attempting to impose mask mandates across the globe. The dirty little truth is that the air we’ve been breathing since the dawn of this…
Give your car sight – A Blackvue DR900X-2CH Dash Camera Review A few weeks ago, I decided that I was going to take a long weekend trip down to Houston, Texas to meet up with a few friends that live down there. In a year where we’ve all been bunkered down in our homes with very little outside world contact, this was going to be one exciting 2020 story to share. Amongst all of the fun activities and stories that happened down in Texas, one thing I immediately noticed was how different the drivers were compared to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin,…
Take a Listen Anytime, Any Place You know what I love about technology? It’s always changing. Love it or hate it, Apple’s removal of the headphone jack has changed the headphone industry forever. As more and more smartphones begin to follow in Apple’s lead to remove the headphone jack (let’s hope they don’t all remove the power brick now too) we’re seeing far more fully wireless options with features jam backed to win you over in an already crowded market. It wasn’t that long ago when we were all using wired earbuds or wireless options that connected the two earbuds…