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Bing Webmaster Tools

  The very large "10 books in 1" tome, "Building Websites (all in one) for Dummies", is something I often peruse late at night. The ways of the Old Web give me comfort. But something caught my eye. 💡 "Submit a sitemap to Google and Bing. Yahoo uses the same search options as Bing, so no need for that." Now, this book is not new (There's a section on how you need to put in some XSS code to be able to take PayPal payments on your Webpress site - Is that still a thing?). So, I thought the idea of sitemaps was long gone. However - sitemaps are still in use today! What is a Sitemap? It's an XML file optimized for search engines to find your website, listing every page on your website. "Spiders" crawl pages to index for search engines. Why Bing? I use Bing for my regular searching on the web. I also submitted my sitemap to Google, as my blog is hosted on their platform and my domain is purchased through them. (I'm not sure it work...

Get in CloudFormation; A Timeline learning IaC for AWS

  Want to share this page easily?  Here's a Notion Page .   A big shoutout to Pluralsight for their free weekend, and James Millar for a great introductory course . For the longest time, I couldn't see how people found this easy, but this helped. (Why did we make up so many programming languages that only work based upon the correct formatting of spaces and tabs? Readability is important, but when you're just beginning, how I learn, I'm interested in 'it works' first and 'it's pretty' second).   The (paid) project: Create an Instance that has basic security rules from a security group it's in. The most difficult part was learning the tool and the formatting. This was much easier in Terraform (Now OpenTofu) for AWS, but this time we wanted to use CloudFormation.   The Numbers: Resources Created: At least 11 VPC MacOSImageID* MacOSInstanceKeyName* InternetGateway PublicInternetRoute VPCGatewayAttachment PublicInternetRouteTable PublicSubnet01 P...

Case Study: The Disappearing Data of T-Mobile

NOTE : The problem has repeated itself. So this doubles as an off the cuff case study in level 1 troubleshooting, looking at data, comparing information at different locations.  Also - I wrote it, and I'm not wasting my time by not publishing it.  I have the Samsung Galaxy A12, and the service through T-Mobile is pretty good. While the infrastructure around our nation is fair at best, it's showing it's age and weakness in storms - and that may apply to private towers owned by T-Mobile as well.  I turn on data, and either: It works The symbol in the upper right does not show up and it's not working. The symbol shows up and the data still doesn't work.     Here's a demo; Other videos are available upon request. Now, there is a setting where I can change the mobile band (2G/3G, 3G/4G) my phone uses, something I was unaware of until a cool Twitter user let me know. This alleviates the problem sometimes, but if I go hours without using data, the problem returns....

Paint 3D: The Hidden Fun in Windows 10

 You may have no need to use Paint 3D, pre-installed software on Windows 10, for any reason than to have fun. And that's reason enough. Here for a fun time, not a long time.

Business Bonus: Disney. Just Disney.

 The Mouse House is in the news, for some changes people are calling rat-like. If you missed the wheeling and dealing of the release of Scarlett Johansson suing Disney for shortchanging her 'Black Widow' pay, it's one for the history books. But Disney recently released something that may hit closer to home. A pay-per-ride system, Genie+, will be implemented in US parks in the near future. It's reminiscent of the ticket books DisneyLand used in the 60s. Now, it's digital, and apparently similar to MaxPass? Truthfully, I haven't been in a Disney park since about 2012. I'm not a Disney Parks person; I like other aspects of Disney; The Animated Canon and some TV shows. It's a dream of mine to stay at a Deluxe Resort - Riviera or Animal Kingdom's Jambo House. But any further than that, is fun I'll leave for someone else. But I do follow multiple Disney news outlets - and several Disney social media accounts - and most park guests fall into 3 categor...

Deploying Docker Containers in AWS and Wandering Around Clusters

  Or, at least learning more about each. And self-learning is the important part, right? And welcome back to not only AWS, but Docker as well. This is a bit of an older post, as I have more experience with Terraform's containerized environments in Azure over AWS. Instructions There is a Console First Run Wizard, here . I have an exceedingly vague idea of what this means in full. Cluster is essentially the pack of what you need to run something. Bing (Yes, Bing), says it's a 'logical grouping of tasks or services'. So 'containers' are the 'physical' grouping, if we consider 'physical = code'. We can define a service, which allows us to run and maintain a specified number of simultaneous instances of a task definition. It sounds a little like a limited pool of IP addresses. This is the free tier, AWS only gives us one. The instructions emphasize Elastic Load Balancing...which took me a while to realize and find. And now the...

Using Windows Media Library as A Media Server (Ft. Visio)

 Disclaimer: This was a few months ago, and the image of the TV's file system is unavailable.    The TV? e500i-b1 by Visio. A couple of years old. I also took the time to update some firmware before doing this. You can make your own standalone Media Server with some 3rd party software to be 1337 ....or you can use Windows 10 built in Media Streaming Options. In an uncanny turn of events, Visio already had an app in place for this very situation: The DLNA Multimedia App, accessed by that large V I've never bothered clicking on the remote.                                                     It's between the volume and channel buttons.  After sharing the appropriate library, it does open a file system with my videos and music. It did work pretty well besides one finale hurdle: It wouldn't play the 20+ minute video. Sh...