Welcome to Ember Networks, my online blog on technology, the world, and life in general. We all take on a lot of different roles throughout our lives and have to learn to navigate the world. Our parents, siblings, friends, schoolmates, teachers, and co-workers have always provided us with plenty of bits of input throughout history. …
NAS Is Everywhere! It seems like, everywhere I turn, I’m reading about how people need a NAS and why it’s so important. Many companies sell enclosures with their own software: QNAP, Synology, and Asustor are just a few names you may come acrcoss. Open Source software like FreeNAS, UnRAID, NAS4Free, or Open Media Vault can …
A short while back, I wrote a number of posts that were focused on getting control of your personal finances. In one of those posts, I described the idea of spending money as a way to save money. Think of this post as a real-world follow-up to that with a concrete, simple example. Spending to …
Up-level your virtual meeting skills!
It has been just over a year since the world I knew was turned on its head and seemingly changed forever. Vaccines have been developed and rolled out with a large majority of the population of the US at least being eligible to receive them, retail has largely been able to operate through most of …
Bitlocker has its benefits and its issues. This write-up covers the specific problems I encountered when attempting to encrypt a virtual hard drive of a Windows 10 guest on XenServer. What is Bitlocker? Bitlocker is a built-in full drive encryption utility that is part of the Microsoft Windows operating systems. It affords you the ability …
Up to this point, everything has been focused directly on reducing spending and saving money. In this article, we’ll look at things from the other side and explore how spending money can save money. Cooking Are you cooking and eating at home more? Great! One of the best ways to keep this going is to …
Welcome to the next step in improving your financial health – learning the art of saving up before you make a purchase! WARNING: There are some very direct statements in this article that may offend some. They are honest and direct, though. The more offended you get, the more you may need to keep reading. …
Create Balance Everything you have been doing up to this point has been in support of balancing your budget so that your income exceeds your necessary expenses each month. Although this would seem to be an obvious thing to do, it’s still worth reviewing ways to accomplish this. And, once you have achieved a balanced …
The hardest part about getting started with a new project is actually getting started! There are always so many different things that you could do “first” that you don’t know which one to actually do. In my first article in this series, I laid out the very first thing to do – assess your current …
A New Way to Work Prior to 2020, working remotely was “the norm” for a lot of people, but was only adopted for certain types of workers. When the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down everyone’s ability to commute and work in an office, the world had to quickly pivot to having the majority of people …