Blog

All of the blog posts contained within The Tech Teapot with the most recent at the top.

The evils of the dashboard merry-go-round

What is the first thing you do when you get to the office? Check your email probably. Then what? I bet you go through the same routine of checking your dashboards to see what’s happened overnight. That is exactly what I do every single morning at work. And I keep checking those dashboards throughout the day. Sometimes I manage to get myself in a loop, continuing around and around the same set of dashboards.

Things I Wished I'd Known Before Developing Xsensior Live

One of the best features of Xsensior Lite is the ability to view your sensor data and alerts anywhere you have web access. The website that provides the ability to see your sensor data is called Xsensior Live. Just log-in and your sensor data is displayed in pretty graphs with 24 hour highs / lows as well as any alerts that have been triggered. The feature was launched just over two years ago.

New domain and last chance to subscribe via email

If you receive The Tech Teapot via email, this is your last chance to continue doing so. From now The Tech Teapot is moving over to use MailChimp instead of Google Feedburner for delivering email with the latest posts. Feedburner has been withering on the vine since being taken over by Google. The reason that this is your final chance is because Google doesn’t manage the email list. Of the 500+ email subscribers, not a single one has been removed from the list due to email bouncing.

Top 3 Cable Tracing Technologies

Firstly, why would you need to trace network cabling? In a perfect world you wouldn’t need to, but even if a network begins life properly labelled, things have a habit of changing. Documentation and cable labelling don’t always keep up when changes are made. A jumble of network cables in a network cabinet. When you need to re-arrange the cabling in your patch panel, can you be 100% certain that the label is correct?

My 2014 Reading Log

A list of all of the books I read in 2014 and logged in Good Reads, I read a few more technical books but didn't log them for whatever reason.

New Aviosys IP Power 9858 Box Opening

A series of box opening photos of the new Aviosys IP Power 9858 4 port network power switch. This model will in due course replace the Aviosys IP Power 9258 series of power switches. The 9258 series is still available in the mean time though, so don’t worry.

Back to Basics

After a while things stop being new. Things that really used to excite you, stop exciting you. Things that you were passionate about, you stop being passionate about. That’s just how things work. I wrote my very first computer program 26 years ago this month. It was in college, using a Perkin Elmer mini computer running Berkeley BSD 4.2 on a VT220 terminal (with a really good keyboard.) The program was written in Pascal.