I Bought Bitcoin Four Days Before China Wrecked the Price
A practical rundown of buying bitcoin on Coinbase in December 2013, including the part where the price crashed four days after I bought in.
Tutorials
Tutorials
Buying My First Bitcoin the Week DC Didn't Freak Out About It
A walkthrough of how I finally bought bitcoin this week through Coinbase, right after a surprisingly calm Senate hearing sent the price climbing toward $900.
Backups or Bust: Surviving the CryptoLocker Scare
A close call with CryptoLocker ransomware in my own family prompted a rundown of what the malware actually does and the practical steps (real backups, CryptoPrevent, showing file extensions) that matter right now.
The Adobe Breach Finally Talked Me Into a Password Manager
The leaked Adobe password hints finally scared me into setting up LastPass. Here's what that actually involved and what nobody warns you about.
The Adobe Breach Finally Got Me Off My One Password
Adobe's breach email landed in my inbox last week and made me finally admit I'd been reusing one password everywhere. Here's how I actually fixed it, step by step.
The Adobe Breach Finally Got Me a Password Manager
The Adobe breach finally scared me into ditching my one recycled password for a real password manager. Notes on LastPass vs 1Password vs KeePass, and how long the cleanup actually takes.
Finally Setting Up A Real Password Manager
The Adobe breach finally pushed me off the couch to set up a real password manager. Here's what that actually looked like, mess and all.
Setting Up GPG After The NSA Story (And Having No One To Email)
After this week's NSA encryption story I finally set up GPG for my own email. The tools work fine; the problem is nobody I actually email has a key.
What the NYTimes Outage Taught Me About My Own Domain
The NYTimes and Twitter outages this week werent a server hack, they were a DNS hijack at the registrar level - which sent me straight into my own domain settings to fix what I found there.
What the NYT Hack Taught Me About My Own Sloppy Domain Security
The Syrian Electronic Army took down nytimes.com by hitting a domain registrar, not the paper itself, which sent me straight to my own registrar dashboard to see how exposed I actually was.
Two Weeks With The $35 Chromecast
Two weeks with Google's $35 Chromecast: the power cable quirk nobody warns you about, what actually works today, and why I'm not ditching my Roku yet.
Life After Google Reader, One Month Later
A month after Google Reader's shutdown, a real-world comparison of Feedly, Digg Reader, and The Old Reader based on actually living with each one.