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

   I play video games, like Hiberworld , but I have never played Roblox. Besides the fact that it's exploiting kids to make games for them and giving them a minuscule amount of money and had an outage that they wrote a very good post-mortem for. Apparently, it was in beta in 2004, when I was 12, and fully released 2 years later. Theoretically, there are people my age who probably have been playing this game for 15 years . That's amazing! I play Splatoon, Fortnite, quite a few remakes of older games (Let's be honest, Sonic Mania was a remake). What new games should I be playing? I don't like taking risks on things that are 60$ (or broken upon release, hello Pokemon Gen 9. Which is such a pity, because Gen 9 looks like the best Pokemon story since Gen 2! But it's broken! But I digress.). I played Zelda for the first time at 30 with Breath of the Wild. I used this guide: Really straightforward and personable fellow. Roblox uses Lua in conjunction with a drag and drop

  Ah yes, almost 3 years ago, I wrote this review (Despite getting the earbuds for Christmas, I wanted to use them for a few months before writing). And in December of 2023, the right one began to get dull regarding sound. I always make sure they're clean - Ear infections are no joke, clean your earbuds - so that wasn't it, I never got the verification code from Samsung to make an account for them to be repaired, and Samsung Support through chat told me to go to my local approved dealer, a random shop 50 miles away that wouldn't actually give me an estimate. I'd much rather repair than replace, especially if it's a gift. I'll open (or attempt to) the faulty one and look around and still use the other one. So here, let's get some new ones on sale, using a combination of giftcards and luck. I was torn between the colors, but I have, more than once, misplaced the black case and was unable to discern it because...most of my stuff is black. I need a case for thi

  There is a general recap by the good sir John Saville over here . That's how I found out about it! I'm more interested in seeing what it can do for my 5- year old refurbished laptop, a laptop I cannot hold too firmly on the left side or the Intel Sound Service cuts off. I had already hit "Boost" before this screenshot - my Memory Usage was at 73%, and now it's at 67-68%. I hit it again and it goes down to about 58% - 63% If I take the time to boost this about once every 5 minutes, boy howdy, we'll be on a roll. I do know it's Firefox that takes up a lot of the memory for some reason. I should do an audit on that. You may have noticed that Smart Boost button, which I did follow and turn on; I wish I could drill down and tell it exactly when to boost, preferably at 70% Memory Usage. Process management is basically a prettier Task Manager; Real Windows users know! Let's see what the PC Manager Health check can do. You'll notice the startup apps to d

 This month really has been FebruAIry, hasn't it?  ICYMI: The Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Experience , run by an "event" company, was an incredibly odd disappointment that happened in Glasgow, Scotland last week. The lush and wonderful treats promised were not in attendance, upsetting guests young and old. So you must be asking, why is this here? On a tech portfolio? Because I'm here to ask; How did this fool so many people? I don't blame the people who paid for this (Not totally): Some are parents who needed a fun activity for their families. Others just wanted to see a cool world and burn an hour or so. It's making us laugh all over the world. However, there were plenty of reasons to believe this wasn't up to snuff. Because just look at this site for the Willy Wonka Experience Event ; You and I can immediately see this is AI generated:   There are also no pictures about this actual event - or any of their past events - on the website. The copy

 Do we call this month FebruAIry? No, we can workshop that. Heyday is - according to their website - Heyday is an AI copilot that transforms your documents, notes, and conversations into quotes, shareable content, and a queryable database. Simplified, it takes your notes - and your browsing history, if you choose - to make a searchable DB to sift through things. You, in theory, can add information from the pages your on if you so choose. It does cost money, but there is a 14-day free trial currently, and it's on Product Hunt as of Feb. 9th 2024. They are still working on correcting the bugs, so here are initial findings and thoughts. After installing the Firefox Extension, the Explore Tab basically has sorted my history. It's fine. Asking the Assistant about trends in my video watching history (because the tab also has that! There's a nice header and everything), didn't give me anything about what I watched. Searching a video creator I know I watched in the search bar