New Year, New Setup Ubuntu 19.10 Desktop I began the new year by buying a new 500GB SSD. My laptop had 2 drives: a 32GB SSD was my /root drive and a 120GB SSD was /home partition. This served me just well but obviously I would run out of space quickly if I was working with virtual machines. With a new drive I had to make the decision to start from scratch or use backups. Read more...

I recently decided to move my Ubuntu installation from my laptop to my desktop without having to reinstall. So basically all I wanted to do is move the SSD (which had Ubuntu 19.10 installed) in my laptop to my desktop. This process is not hard at all but in my case it was a little more complicated. I wanted to do a dual boot on my desktop computer with 2 different hard drives. Read more...

I blogged before about switching from Firefox Focus to DuckDuckGo mobile. Now it’s been 3 weeks since I made the switch and I wanted to do a quick post about my experience. First, it’s going great. I really like the fact that a search widget is included. I replaced the Google search with DuckDuckGo and I find myself using it a lot more. Which is great because I really like using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Read more...

Region One hosted a Cybersecurity Summit for 2019 in Edinburg, TX. The event was free and I signed up to attend. It was a great event that had many great presenters. The theme of the summit was Cybersecurity on a regional level. Here are some of the talks I attended and the takeaways I got from them. Reduce Your Cybersecurity Risk and Get Complaint with SB 820 – Develop Policy: use already established policies as blueprints – Items to invest in: Malware protection/Endpoint protection, Firewalls, IDS/IPS, Spam Filtering, Log Monitoring Read more...

I have been using Firefox Focus for about half a year now. I came to use because I was using Chrome and simply got paranoid of what stuff Google was collecting via Chrome. So I made the switch to Firefox on my PC and started using Firefox for Android. Now before I started using Firefox Focus I was using Brave Browser for Android. Brave Browser is a Chromium based browser that tauts privacy for the end user. Read more...

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Since I have been reading “self-help” books my wife suggested I check out The Alchemist. Luckily she owned a copy, so I grabbed it from our bookshelf and stuffed it in my backpack. I gotta say that I really enjoyed this book. I can now see why so many people consider it a “self-help”, book. Here are a two of my favorite passages: My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer”, the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. Read more...

Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg I had heard so much of Charles Duhigg from many “entrepreneurial youtubers”, so naturally I became curious of his work. Most people recommend his book The Power of Habit, I even remember a colleague reading it. But I didn’t find a copy of it at my local library but I did find a copy of Smarter Faster Better instead. Read more...

To help celebrate National CyberSecurity Awareness month the Information Security office at South Texas College created an “Escape Room” challenge. I got to participate in this years festivities. I like the challenge of doing escape rooms so one that had a cybersecurity theme seemed even more fun. The activity was quite fun despite not being able to “escape” in time. The challenge consisted of finding the decryption key to decrypt a computer that was attacked with Ransomware. Read more...

I was having a conversation with my wife and I said to her “You know, I feel like I’m getting dumber”. We both laughed out loud at my ridiculous statement, she then asked why I felt that. The reason I was l feeling like that was because I was simply spending too much time on other silly distractions. And no it wasn’t just “social media”, I tend to go down YouTube rabbit holes too. Read more...

Ever needed to reset your Windows password but forgot to make a Windows Reset Password disk? If so, you can easily reset a Windows Users password with a Live Linux USB. Let’s see just how easy it is to so. If you don’t a Live Linux USB go ahead an create one. This tutorial is Ubuntu based so any Ubuntu flavor will work. And you will need a working internet connection to download software. Read more...