I recently attempted to buy a top-of-the-line gaming computer from Dell. An Aurora 13 loaded with an Nvidia 3090, 64 GB, decent SSD storage, and a great CPU. A dream machine for about $5000. It’s been a long, long time since I bought a machine. I typically buy components cheap…

Last February, our home lost power for five days during a winter storm. Never in my life have I been so cold. The only defense my family had was to cover up in layers of clothes, blankets, and other bedding. Even the cat and the dog needed help. It reached…

Last March, my company moved to a fully remote workforce as a result of COVID-19. Indeed, most of my industry did. Working from home was not all that abnormal for me. For much of the last ten years, I worked in a startup, and we did not have formal office…

I learned vi in 1991 at university. I kind of immediately took to it, likely because I had messed around a lot with the DOS edlin.exe. The vi editor was so super powerful in comparison. At the time, Vim did not exist or was not popular. A few years later…

An important part of any puppet deployment are custom facts. Facts identify specific attributes about the machines in your environment. For example, a fact might indicate if a specific application is installed, another may identify the version of that application. Some facts are built in and available by default, for…