RUN TCP/IP | Morgan Lucas is Tech Blogging

     Can I make an Alexa Skill That Searches Bing?   I use Bing as my search engine, and would love it if I could ask Alexa and have that trail of searches attached to my account to look back upon.  Fun fact: When you ask Alexa a question, it's already using Bing. But it's not using my account. So let's see if I can walk through the idea.  Questions:  Alexa searches the internet when you ask it a query. What specifically does it search? It's own database of information? Is it like ChatGPT where the system is not directly connected to the internet but has all of the internet up until a certain point in the past?  Can I make an Alexa Skill that attaches to a dataset of information I host on AWS? The preliminary search reveals Knowledge Skills , which seems to be "give us information and when people ask about it, we can just tell them within the scope of our knowledge." Would I need AWS to make an Alexa Skill at all? Most likely; When you create a custom skill

 I now have the URL runtcpip.com pointed toward my Google Sites site. This change is reflected on the navigation as 'Projects (Cloud)'. Why? Despite both Blogger and Google Sites being owned by Alphabet/Google, Sites is actually maintained. Google Sites has better security posture and features. It looks more modern, and has multiple pages. I'm 89% sure the SEO is already built in and works better. I didn't have to finangle with attaching Analytics  This blog isn't going anywhere! It will be used as more general technology musings...which it kind of already was. One day I will have another URL to point here, but for now, you can reach it via https://runtcpip.blogspot.com/

 Out of all the online tools I've tried and tested, I can't believe I haven't talked about this one, one I've used over 4 years at this point and continues to add features that help. It's how I found many emails to politely and persistently ask about my application while sending relevant links to this blog but there's a lot more down there too! I uploaded the .CSV of emails to recruiters I use to send personalized, yet still batch, emails through Google Sheets to check for validity and acceptance rates.  It did work, but I retracted everyone's information.   I had used the tool to check a few individual addresses and it did find one that was no longer operational; Suppose the person moved onto a new role. I also converted it to a Campaign to send mass emails - which does have a neat thing to check how spammy one's email may be, though it doesn't give hints on how to better coerce click through and action for recipients.  It seems to correlate doing

 With the Viacom removal of MTV News and Comedy Central clips dating back to the late 90s (and allegedly putting them on Paramount+, but who has that?), people are realizing "The internet is no longer fun, corporations run everything, and they are not interested in maintaining history." Sure it was possible for arts   So back up your stuff. Let's go. How To Back Up Your Blog on Blogger If you use Blogger, there's a general  landing page for your blog, with a list of posts both published and drafted, and a navigation bar on the side. Hit settings, then scroll down until you see this [right]. You can select 'Back up content', it's just not a clear hyperlink.  It will download a file to your computer. (You are reading from one of those, right? You do know how to download a file, right? You don't need to click this link to my video explaining it to you in less than a minute ?) How to Download Your Account Data on LinkedIn Click the photo of you / 'Me&

I have always wanted smart lighting, but didn't want to essentially have a hackable hub with minimal controls regarding security (It has to have improved since 2018 , right? Right? ). So, seeing these lightbulbs that did not require a hub setup, an app, and only cost 5$ (On clearance, I got mine at my local Target, originally the GE LED+ Color Changing Light Bulbs are about 17$-25$!), it would have been stupid to leave them behind. This is not an affiliate link, you can find them here . The subjects for these will be a variety of dolls in colors ranging from almost pitch black to stark white and things in between to really show off the color scope. Set-Up: Screw the lightbulb in a port. The remote already has batteries, and you take out that plastic bit. That's it! The remote is flimsy. With stronger remotes, you can point at a wall and the waves still manage to be read by the technology, but I'm not a wave scientist.  Despite that, with 16 colors, 4 lighting strengths, wa

 This is From The Drafts , when I have nothing in the queue as I am working on gaining roles and contracts. Dated 9/2019. Amazon / Publisher Site Going a little further from the Wireshark course I've never heard of Enterasys and Nortel switches before reading this. Usually Juniper, Palo Alto and, of course, Cisco. He mentioned taps, and showed a picture of a box with places for cables on the sides...I was thinking about needles breaking through the soft outer layer and conical things connected to small boxes. Those are the kinds I'm used to seeing, so an actual box was pretty interesting. It's the only way you could take the data of a glass-coated Fiber line anyway. Did you know you can sort out the % of protocols that show up in a packet capture? You can, with Protocol Hierarchy Statistics.  There's an Expert Information section of file captures; For your everyday life.

 I touch base with people once a month, and it's about 20 people, and I need to automate sending the messages. I write the messages myself, don't worry, this entire thing isn't automated, what am I?  If that is you, and you are reading this - Hello! You were part of a successful experiment!  You could use this to, well, send messages en masse. I only added people who have opened a dialogue with me, not random people I find on the internet. Use discretion. I wanted to create an automated script to mass send it, so I used both Bing CoPilot and ChatGPT and started with the same prompt to see if it could create it;     [alt:  Write a Gmail script that inserts formatted text to each selected email in my inbox.  It should be able to accept hyperlinks  You should prompt me for the text once each time I run it.  It should not send the email.  ]     Copilot gave me a script, and then followed up with apparently creating a Google Developers Account to make apps that work in the Googl