During last week's record-breaking snowstorm in St. Louis, I was not motivated to brave the 10+ inches of snow and -20 (and lower) temperatures to get pictures outside of the comfort of my climate-controlled home. I did, however, snap some pictures of birds eating from the feeders in my backyard, which my wife wisely filled the day before the storm.

For a while, there was only one small bird eating from the sunflower seed feeder (there were a bunch

Update (3/4/14) : Mac OS X 10.9.2 seems to fix at least the latency issue—and possibly dropped connections as well, at least for most users I've spoken with... We'll see!

Update 2 (11/25/14) : If you're having trouble with iOS 8 and/or Yosemite, it could be related to AirDrop services over WiFi. Please see WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

For the past eight months, I've been working at a cubicle, sitting around 8 hours a day, at my new job with Mercy . Prior to this job, I had gotten up to about 6 hours a day standing at my home office standing desk (see how I made the standing desk ), and reverting to the sitting position has taken its toll on my back and neck!

I decided to start working from a standing position at work, but was presented with a challenge: how can I work

I've written previously about my simple $50 standing desk that can be installed on a wall. That standing desk worked great at my house, where I worked full-time as a remote employee for a few years. I started a new job for a local company in April 2013, working on-site, and was relegated to a cubicle with a decidedly un-adjustable sitting-height desk top. Even when using a Pomodoro -esque technique of standing and moving around every 20

2014 is going to be a big year for Drupal. I spent a lot of 2013 sprucing up services like Hosted Apache Solr and Server Check.in (both running on Drupal 7 currently), and porting some of my Drupal projects to Drupal 8.

So far I've made great progress on Honeypot and Wysiwyg Linebreaks , which I started migrating a while back. Both modules work and pass all tests on Drupal's current dev/alpha release, and I plan on following through

On one server, where I have a custom directory where all the Apache (httpd) error and access logs are written, one set per virtualhost, I noticed the folder had grown to multiple gigabytes in size (found using du -h --max-depth=1 )—in this situation, there's a handy utility on pretty much every Linux/UNIX system called logrotate that is made to help ensure log files don't grow too large. It periodically copies and optionally compresses the log

Server Check.in's entire infrastructure is managed via Ansible , which has helped tremendously as the service has grown from one to many servers.

One pain point with running Apache servers that host more than one website (using name-based virtual hosts ) is that the virtual host configuration files quickly get unwieldy, as you have to define the entire for every domain you have on the server, and besides Apache's mod_macro , there's no easy way

There are individuals and companies who still believe it would be in their best interest to maintain a 'desktop' version of their website, and a completely or mostly-separate 'mobile' version of their site, and this belief (especially in the corporate arena) was strengthened by a recent (2012) report by the Nielsen Norman Group, Mobile Site vs. Full Site , which recommended a separate mobile site with stripped-down features and different design. The idea of having a mobile-optimized design

Every few years, I spend some time trying to trim any excess off my online presence (sites and social media profiles). For some time, that resulted in consolidation of many websites into one. Lately, as I've built up a larger network of sites and services, I've simply tried to ensure that all are manageable and don't require too much of my time to be effective.

My bandwidth for managing multiple sites and accounts has been reduced this year as I've started a new