I'm a 35 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Retrofitting USB port on older APC BackUPS with RJ50
Before companies have standardized on USB, it was pretty common to find some strange connectors on equipment. Especially if they don’t want anyone to accidentally plug in the wrong thing. APC battery backups are a perfect example of using a RJ-50 plug to connect the USB signalling cable. To be fair, the RJ-50 plug with 10 [...]
Dell RPS-720 Cable Pinout
If you own a Dell Redundant Power Supply unit (e.g. RPS-600 or RPS-720), hopefully you have the original 4 cables it came with because they are very difficult to find and you can’t even order them from Dell. There are not many details about these cords online which adds to the mystery of them. Interestingly, they are not as [...]
Xcode to Swift Versions
Recently I’ve ran into an old legacy project that my company built years ago and was then left untouched for a while. Having to open up that old code quickly ran into the issue of what version of Xcode do you need to be able to run Swift 2.3 code? Download Older Xcodes from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ Swift 2.2 [...]
Increasing EBS disk space to a running EC2 instance
One of the best parts of running a cloud solution is the ability to make some “hardware” level changes without even a reboot. First, in the AWS Console, go to the EBS Volume Screen and hopefully you have labelled your EBS volumes with human readable labels (or you will have to click on each volume and see what instance it is [...]
AWS T2 vs T3 vs T3a Performance
Amazon just came out with the new 3rd generation of burst-able EC2 servers and to keep things short, you should shut down your t2 servers and restart them as t3. What is the difference between AWS t2 and t3 and t3a series? Burstable Series t2.micro 1 Core from an Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40Ghz (released 2013)1GB Memory3227 Geekbench 4 [...]
IR Codes for Insignia TV Remote NS-RC4NA-14
I’m currently working on a project that will create an small ultra cheap IoT device that will link to Alexa or Google Home to allow you to control any IR device with your voice. Its in the ballpark of what a Logitech Harmony Hub can do but for a fraction of the cost. In doing that I needed to get the IR codes of my [...]
iMac LACP to Improve Network Throughput
If you are looking to improve your network throughput on an iMac, you will find it difficult to get 10G adapters on a thunderbolt 2 device. While it’s possible, it’s very pricey. This is my attempt to LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) with the onboard gigabit port and a thunderbolt gigabit ethernet adapter. The Result [...]