How to share a Mac/Apple Bluetooth Magic Mouse 1/2 or Touchpad 1/2 or Keyboard 1/2

So you have a Mac Keyboard, Trackpad, or Mouse…maybe you have a combination of one or more of them…

And you have multiple computers? A Macbook Pro Retina, a Windows desktop or a Linux Desktop or another laptop who knows who cares…

I ended up following this tutorial a lot.

You’ll need a KVM, I have a GCS1104…you’ll also need a bluetooth dongle, I tried about 5…none worked finally the Plugable USB Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy Micro Adapter did.

From there I followed the above guide…

1. Sync the devices with your windows computers and or linux computers.
2. Now sync the devices to your Apple computer
3. Run this command on your mac via terminal sudo defaults read /private/var/root/Library/Preferences/blued.plist
• You should get something like this:
• {
LinkKeys = {
"00-aa-bb-cc-dd-ee" = {
"00-00-00-aa-aa-aa" = ;
};
};
}
• So the first mac is the mac address of your bluetooth dongle
• The next is the device, then the value is the link key…we need to match these up on the other computers
4. Head back over to windows and run regedit
5. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTHPORT\Parameters\Keys
6. I had to change the ownership of the Parameters folder to myself to view these keys, then clicked the keys folder and hit F5
7. Now you can find the same mac as above and then the device mac
8. Click it and change the value to the link key, but hold up…it isn’t so easy
9. You need to change the mac os x link key to a windows/linux key 81a83517 cc3c7afc fb8e99fc 5147fbf4 would become f4fb8e99fc f4fb4751fc998efbfc7a3ccc1735a881.
10. If this is too complex for you I wrote a tool for you: https://jsfiddle.net/vxuya97w/embedded/result/#Result

Enjoy!

How to make a pull chain Green Screen

If you want the Tutorial Scroll down, the story follows:

If you are like me you stream, but you don’t want streaming to take up a ton of room…so I thought why not have a green screen that rolls up to your ceiling and out of the way, all in a matter of seconds.

So after searching for anyone that may have done this before I came up empty, due to this I started some research and found the good fellows at sailrite they sell a lovely Roller Shade Clutch Kit.  The price tag on this is right around $80 USD but considering the mess it is saving me I would of paid more, especially with the build quality (which is superb other than the Plastic sides and pull chain*).

Tutorial

1. Get a piece of Neon Green Fleece at JoAnn’s Fabric for about $17 for 3 yards.
2. Get the sailrite kit from here

The sailrite kit comes with a ton of different instructions most of which aren’t meant for green screens and thereby we get to ignore! However, the metal hinges which aren’t tall enough when you are using a thick material like fleece (so add some wooden spacers between them and your ceiling or wall to get 1/4 extra space).

Basic Steps

1. Put the fleece against the metal bar and remove the paper over the glue and adhere the fleece, you will also want to wrap around the fleece 1 time and then sew along so the weight of the fleece doesn’t solely rest on the adhesive strip.
   

   

   
2. Sew a pocket at the bottom so that you can slide the wooden strip in the bottom.
   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   
3. Now you just need to attach the pulley and the other roller side and hang the bad boy with some screws
   

   

   

   

 

*they are well made…just disappointed they were plastic

How to get weapon’s parts in the TTK (Year 2) Destiny

So if you are like me you are always asking, where are the weapon parts at?

Here is how I got a quick 50 weapon parts for 13 motes per weapon.

Grab your weapons core (obtained from PoE) then buy the weapons from veriks to get those legendary guns, then use motes to upgrade the weapon to max (don’t actually upgrade the gun just max the green bar.) , if you have a class item that has X weapon upgrades faster equip it.

This nets 6-8 weapon parts per disassemble + motes and some random things

abc123 quick pro tip – DESTINY – TTK – FASTER LIGHT LEVEL

Hey there fellow guardians,
Let me guess you bought The Taken King and you can’t tell why your friends are getting light level soooooo much faster than you?

Here’s a quick pro tip:
Decrypting Engrams – You decrypt engrams around your current characters light level

So when you have more than one engram, instead of just slamming the decode button…
Sequence:
1. decode one
2. press start
3. see if it is better than currently equipped
4. if it is equip it (DON’T INFUSE UNTIL YOU DON’T HAVE ANY MORE ENGRAMS)
5. repeat for each engram
— DO LEGENDARIES LAST —
— DO LEGENDARY WEAPON ENGRAMS ON WHICHEVER CHARACTER HAS THE HIGHEST LIGHT LEVEL —

Google Hangouts – the “awesome” desktop app

So I am back at a company that uses google for all their communication (not just google but the corporate google apps package). Anyways when you download the Hangouts standalone app you may notice a few things.

1. When you close your laptop and it goes to sleep, upon opening said laptop hangouts has decided to die a fatal death.
a. Simply make sure that hangouts is always on your MAIN/PRIMARY desktop and this issue will disappear
2. When you close your laptop overnight upon returning in the morning the transparent shadows are simply black.
a. This is a known issue https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=428627

Enjoy

How to fix xk3y remote (mirco usb port)

So here you are, i’m guessing you ordered an xk3y with the lovely xk3y remote and you can’t get the remote to read from the xk3y…

Well that’s what mine did out of the box..the micro usb port is so cheap and broken that it will break 100% guaranteed…

I contacted the website that I bought it from (same day it arrived) and they told me to pay to ship it to their “repair” guy…but if they decide it was user error (everything can be) they won’t fix it and you have to pay to ship it back from them.

So instead I fixed it myself, below are the images of the project…

Parts:
Micro USB Port – https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8533
Soldering Iron
Solder
Desolder Braid

How can I tell if my iPhone 6 has “water damage” officially

Unlike it’s predecessors the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus only have 1 internal water damage indicator/sensor. This sticker is on the logic board, at the top in the middle; right below the front display/screen.

On the iPhone 6 Plus it is horizontal:

On the iPhone 6 it is vertical:

In the pictures it is white, if you had water damage “officially” it would be red/pink.

Yosemite 10.10.3 – F5 Big IP Edge VPN

So as any curious developer I installed the latest 10.10.3 beta Yosemite update. One issue from then on connecting to BigIP Edge Webclient would throw and SSL Connection Error, over and over…in FireFox, Safari, and Chrome.

So I had the IT administrator send me the F5-BigIP-Edge-Client for Mac, installing this solved my issue immediately. However, when I got home the issue changed…when I connected using the Client it would crash immediately…

Apparently there is a bug in this program with multiple monitors…to solve the issue I changed my Preferences to the following:

Hope this helps you if you happen to be in the same unusual boat as me…

Chef what is it and why you should of been using it all along…

Configuration Management is nothing new, since the advent of System Administrators scripts have been written to stand servers up and configure them to at least a basic level.

What’s new? Chef.io and puppet

These amazing tools allow you to configure each of your systems differently or group them together to be configured in a unified manor.  This is extremely valuable because it allows for a somewhat slower startup time to a 0 time everytime after that.  And as an Systems Administrator can tell you, if you have stood up anything you’ll likely need to stand it up all over again at some point.

Look into these tools and really try to see them for the saviors they are, the god sends that shall guard your IT fortress with all the powers of Zeus behind them.

In the Windows World…how should you deploy?

If you are a release engineer, release manager, source control engineer, jack of all trades, or even just a one man shop at some point that question comes to mind.

You need to put these websites you wrote onto a Windows server, but how should you do it?

The answer for a lot of people is simple; i’ll make a Shared Folder (SMB share) and copy the files to it (xcopy, robocopy).

Then they run into issues with IIS running and maybe they write a bat file that disables IIS via WMI, or Entity (in C#), or psexec.

Or maybe you are a windows nut and said MSDeploy will solve all my issues…

If one of these was your answer, or you still can’t think of the answer please feel free to learn from my mistakes.

And then there was configuration management (Puppet and Chef being the forerunners), here is a more comprehensive list from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_configuration_management_software

You might be wondering how is configuration management going to help me do a website deployment, to be honest it is a good question.

With chef you will consume the IIS cookbook, as well as writing some custom recipes. In this recipe, you will want to stop the website you are deploying.  Next, you should download the artifact from the resulting build.  From here it is pretty easy, you are going to unzip (using the windows cookbook) to the wwwroot dir and then start IIS back up.  So from this you can see you are probably going to want some variables.  I’d recommend the following url to artifact, directory, website name.  With these 3 variables you’ll be deploying websites to windows servers, easy and painless.

The chef recipe itself isn’t very complex but when you think about it, this allows any number of webservers in your farm to download the artifact and then deploy the code changes themselves.  All at the same time, now I did say artifacts…bummer right? wrong.  Artifacts are singularly one of the best choices for releases, this allows you to release the same exact code over and over from environment to environment and from server to server.  This means you don’t have some random change that happens because someone made a simple typo.

Anyways, enjoy!