Author: Joe Nord

My primary desktop computer has an integrated audio device on the system board and a USB attached Blue Yeti microphone.  Great mic, it makes me sound good on online meetings and that’s a win.  The Yeti in addition to being a high quality microphone also has a headphone jack underneath, which has a very high […]

Hurricane approaching, you live on the water with a canal behind the house, does the boat go in the water or stay on the lift? With the experience of hurricane Irma just completed, I can answer this question: Put the boat in the water. A better answer is “get the boat out of the water, […]

Phishing is popular activity in evil circles. Avoiding HTML and rich-text formatted email is a level of defense; one that I’ve taken on recently as a matter of security hygiene. This post describes how to configure Microsoft Office 2016 to read and send all email as text, and discusses some of the opportunities lost in […]

Setting up a secondary FTP account for GoDaddy CPanel hosting requires different configuration than I expected. The trick is that while the primary FTP account uses SFTP, the secondary accounts need to be configured for FTP over TLS. This was a large enough headache for me that I share the details here so some others may be […]

Steve Ballmer is paraphrased in this ZDNet article saying “the company needs to ensure Windows Phone handsets can run Android apps”.  For a guy who spent more than 5 years writing system code for OS/2, the parallels to WinOS2 are pretty interesting.   Here’s the lesson: The operating system must stand on its own, or your just postpone […]

Originally published Dec 24 2014 Found an unusual PHP file hiding in the root directory of my personal website, “s-g.txt”.  The file contains PHP code and last line contains “lave” which for some reason, the human brain quickly converts into “eval” and that’s suspicious, so it’s time to tear this apart.  Note: Despite my attempts to post the […]

(Originally published Oct 24 2013) At the 2013 Masters Golf Tournament, Tiger Woods nearly holed an approach shot on the 15th hole – only to have it bounce off the flag and go back into the water. Tough break!  A number of friends have asked me to explain the 3 strokes in penalty so I write […]

Written December 1, 2008. I recently received an inquiry regarding how OS/2 interrupts are handled and what is the correct action of a device driver upon being called by the OS/2 kernel. My first response was, you have got to be kidding me, the operating system has been dead for 10 years. The second response […]