The Blog of Michael Lee Mitchell

The 3 c's. I have my Christmas shopping done. I have all gifts bought and ready for the day. I had to decrease my spending this year, but hopefully everyone will understand. I have plenty changes coming to the website. Early next year you will see them if you come to the website. I plan on discontinuing my Inmotion Hosting Shared Hosting plan. I have been with them for 9 years. I probably had very minimal impact on their server. The only thing I mainly use is the email service part of it. I am going to host my email somewhere else. I will move my domain away from SquareSpace and I am moving my blog to Micro.Blog. I think this will be more cost effective, and streamline my flow. I have heard great things about Micro.blog and what really sold me was the fact that they will import my WordPress posts and images. I am moving away from WordPress for several reasons. It is a little hard to use. Cost way to much for a personal site to have everything I would like. The third r...

Thanksgiving is almost done for 2024. I have been thinking of what I am thankful for this year. Number 1 thing I am thankful for is my salvation that our Lord and Savior Jesus gave us all. I am thankful for my family. I am thankful Jesus has improved my health this year through the knowledge and wisdom of my doctors. I am thankful Jesus provides me with a job so that I can meet my needs and enjoy some extras, even though I probably have too many things. So I have a lot I am thankful for and hope and pray that Jesus carries me forward into 2025 with the list above and improvement. I really want to expand my technology knowledge level. That is a main goal for next year. But I think the biggest goal for next year is to chip away at significant portions of debt. As I approach retirement, I need to eliminate my debts. Well I hope everyone else enjoyed their 2024 Thanksgiving Day and got as stuffed on food as I did. Looking forward to the new year personally, and as always reflecting on ...

OK just watched Alien Romulus and I thought it was a great reboot to the series. Hope they continue with this new line. There were some nods to the original series and sequels with Sigourney Weaver. #AliensRomulus #Movies #nospoilers

I am looking forward to next week. After Monday I will be off the rest of the week. I need a little of break. I am going to be gaming, reading, relaxing and getting ready for Thanksgiving. Generally this is my favorite time of the year. I already have my Christmas shopping done and the Thanksgiving dinner stuff has been bought. Looking forward to everything. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

BeeStation, CGU and Raspberry Pi 5 in the Prionman 5 The Raspberry Pi 5 has come to the setup and Pi-Hole is on duty. So far it has been a little easier than I thought I would be. Ignore the cables. Cable management is not my specialty. I think it looks right at home with the CGU and next to the BeeStation. Next step getting it utilized more with other projects. Next Project setting up a Windows 11 PC for Dockerized container projects. But before that I have to replace a failing/old external hard drive for backup. Just wish I was more knowledgeable in the stuff. I want to begin to learn Hugo for static websites. If anyone has any good suggestions on where to start please let me know. Hope everyone had a great weekend. I know I did getting things accomplished. One down and more to go.

I am trying to do a little updating to the website and making sure everything is working. I am finding that things don't work the way I want them to. It is kind of hard when you aren't a website savant. I am working my way through I believe. If you look at the site you would say it is pretty minimal at best. On the back-end making sure things post correctly and where I want them to is a little bit of like cooking. I am layering on all the plugins to make a post once publish everywhere works. Just like in cooking you want to layer on the flavors. Cooking and coding something that they have in common. I think am I much better at cooking then coding.

Anybody have any suggestions on what I should move to from WordPress? Show I go to a service like Micro.blog, Write.as? Should I go back to Blogspot? I don't mind paying a reasonable price. But I also would like to be all inclusive if possible. Also, any suggestions what I should put on my new Raspberry Pi 5 Pironman 5 build I made, besides Pi-Hole with Unbound? Anyone know any good resources on Hugo? I was thinking of switching to a static site generator to. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Times are indeed changing and so has my blog theme. I went with the newest from WordPress and it is clean. See you thought I was going to talk about the election. I will in the future.... I am possibly moving away from WordPress. I don't like all the fireworks going on around it right now and don't like how everything good cost money. Don't get me wrong I don't mind spending some money. In fact recently I moved to hosted Mastodon with Masto.host (by the way if you need a good Mastodon hosting service it is really great and the owner is probably the best I have ever interacted with.)! WordPress costs a lot of money if you want nicer themes, Jetpack and other features add to the cost. It is especially challenging too. I am trying to learn it, but I have questions. There is no one to ask, and I have not found any good sources. AI has been helpful but not always and for everything. My shared hosting contract is up next year and I have been thinking of going ba...

Today I spent putting together my first Raspberry Pi 5 and Pironman 5 case. Friday I updated the boot loader and installed the OS on the Nvme drive. I put it all together updated the OS with the Pironman updates for the little bitty screen (which is quite useful) and the fans to shut down properly and it all worked. Now to learn Docker and install some different apps (like, Nginx, Pi-hole with Unbound and etc). It will still be a while but the computer is functional 😀. #learning #raspberrypi

I am so glad elections are over. I understand that the next 4 years no matter who would have won would be difficult. The Nation is undergoing a transition to what and for what not sure. But I am confident in one thing my constituency is safe and sound.

Hello everyone. It has been a while since I posted an update and thought I would cover the end of August 2024 and September 2024. Health-wise, I have actually not been great. I started Mounjaro to help with some weight loss and diabetic control (even though my A1C is not too bad: 6.1 as of my last one). The Mounjaro has caused a lot of gastrointestinal issues for me and they have not stopped or lessened. Actually, with the increase of dose (currently on the 7.25mg) it has gotten worse. I have lost some weight, approximately 16 pounds, but I don't know if the side effects are worth it. Due to my obstructive Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy and asthma, I can't exercise like someone without these conditions. I am hoping to hold out and finish the six doses I have left (possibly going to every other week) to help lessen the side effects. I would rather lose some weight, allow my stomach to contract, and hopefully keep off the weight with the smaller stomach. I also had an echocard...

Today I had an echocardiogram today and I already have the results all though the doctor has not reviewed that just as of yet. That is the beauty of MyChart you see the test results as soon as they are ready. My Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy is getting worse. My septum is thickening even more and faster than before and my left atrium has stretched even more. What will the doctor do I am not sure. I am already on a beta blocker, calcium channel blocker and a blood thinner. I don't know what will be the next thing another medicine so 3 total and or an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) or both? Will update as soon as I am told more.

I finally purchased the last little bit of gear for my prosumer setup from Unifi. So everything should be upgraded and done for the next 5 to 10 years by the end of August 2024. I am looking forward to completing it and having all Unifi network gear. So far it has been good and I am learning alot. Next project putting my Raspberry Pi 5 together with the neat miniPC case I bought and getting Pi-Hole up and running. Still thinking about UnBound too. Well have a great weekend everyone and thanks for going on this networking journey with me.

Well, today I woke up took down my old router the TP-Link Omada ER7206 v1.6 and install and setup my new Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra. The primary WAN (which is Frontier Fiber) went smooth no problems. When I was setting up the failover WAN (Spectrum) man did I have problems it was not finding it even after the small changes I had to do in the console screen. 2 hours later trouble shooting the Spectrum 3.0 DOCSIS modem would not reconnect and then just didn't power on (which leads me to believe it may not have been working for at least a couple of weeks). So chatted with Spectrum and had then activate my own S33 Arris DOCSIS 3.1 modem and bam bang bong it was up and running. The CGU found it speed test went great and everything is up and running. Then I look at my Elgato Stream Deck and no stock tickers they are all bleak. Thinking it might be the CGU and the DNS secure setting I poked around. Found that there was a plugin update to the plugin for the stocks and that I now needed...

I hope to redo my network equipment before the end of the year. I am hoping to switch everything to UniFi. I already have the Cloud Gateway Ultra router. I am going to get 2 WiFi 7 AP's 2 switches one network extender (this is just in case) and 2 flex mini's. My whole system will then be UniFi from start to finish. I am thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi 5 to use Pi-hole and some other stuff on it. This will all replace my aging Orbi WiFi Mesh 5 system that I am currently using in AP mode only with a TP-Link first generation ER7206. Why am I doing all this because I want things in place for the next 5 to 10 years and not have to worry about my network cables or network equipment and I can finally do this since I can finally afford it.

In the last 3 years some news worthy things have happened. For instance yesterday on my birthday in the afternoon I was helping my mother unload some groceries she had brought over and we both heard a loud bang and short after a loud scream by a women. A look at my mother and said what was that. That was loud but at least it didn't shake the house and windows violently like a few years ago. At the 10 clock news I found out what it was this . Which brings me to a few years ago. A house around a couple of corners from ours blew up. That shook the house and the windows and was again on the news here . My dad happened to be here when that happened. I don't know what is going on around here. At least yesterday no one died and was not seriously injured unlike when the house blew up. This was the interesting thing I was looking on. Well have a great weekend everyone.

Today is my birthday. I celebrated by having a steak dinner with my family and bought myself a watch. I took today and tomorrow off from work. It was a good day overall. I am working on another post about something that did happened today. Not related to my birthday but interesting. Hope to share more in the days to come.

Well, I updated the website with a new theme. Let me know what you think. I think it looks good. I add a couple of plug-ins and widgets. I don't want to make it too busy. I did try another one before this one but I could not make it work. I went with this one instead.

I have embarked on moving my email across many different emails to one centralized email address. Why for privacy and security. I am just fed up with Microsoft, Google and AOL/Yahoo and other scanning my email and what if they ever decide to kill the product or increase the prices even more than they have recently. My own domain is shared and there is always that security problem. So I have been moving almost everything to Proton mail as it is encrypted at rest and my domains email. I am only keeping very specific things at Hotmail/Outlook and Gmail and really have moved 98 percent of the stuff I had going to AOL/Yahoo off. But companies don't make it easy sometimes. Some companies are great about letting you change your email address. They verify who you are and then verify your new email. Other companies are just terrible make it difficult and arduous so instead of still getting there emails I just unsubscribe if I really want it then I subscribe like I am new, but that has been...