Dave Kokandy

WordCamp Kent

Published by Dave on July 6, 2017

I had a great time at WordCamp Kent in June, where I was inspired to do new things with this site and other websites that I run. This WordCamp was quite affordable (just $40) and included plenty of speakers presenting on great WordPress topics, great conversations between sessions and in the hallways with presenters, vendors, and other attendees, and plenty of great food. As an alum of Kent State University, it was also wonderful to be back in Kent, see how some parts of the downtown and the campus has changed and grown since I graduated, and visit some of my old stomping grounds again.

What would it take for me to buy a new tablet?

What would it take for me to buy a new tablet?

Published by Dave on May 23, 2017

What would it take for you to buy a new tablet? (Android Authority)

Tablet sales have been going down for some years — but what would it take for you to buy a new one? Here, we discuss the current state of the market.

In a recent Android Authority article, author Scott Adam Gordon asks, “What would it take for you to buy a new tablet?” He concludes that the reason tablet sales are on the decrease is because people don’t buy new tablets for spec bumps… he sees 6 scenarios in which someone might buy a new tablet:

Which Tech Giant Would I Drop?

Which Tech Giant Would I Drop?

Published by Dave on May 11, 2017

Which Tech Giant Would You Drop? (nytimes.com)

The Big Five tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. Could you ditch them?

In the linked interactive feature, the New York Times posed the question:

If an evil monarch forced you to choose, in what order would you give up these inescapable giants of tech?

The first is an easy pick for me. Apple, the seller of shiny, overpriced products, powered by a buggy cloud, with a mobile operating system on which things are either dumbed down to 5-year old simplicity or completely impossible. I have owned Apple products in the past, including an iPod Touch I still use occasionally, but in my personal opinion Apple operating systems are inferior to other options and build quality of Apple products is not significantly above that of their competitors to justify the incredible price markup. I hate iTunes with a burning passion and frequently will not purchase music I intend to purchase if it is not available from Amazon or Google Play.

Identifying Suspicious Job Postings to Job Boards

Identifying Suspicious Job Postings to Job Boards

Published by Dave on May 5, 2017

Apparent scams and fraudulent job postings have been on the rise lately in online job boards. After two positions that we approved in Ashland University’s on campus job board ended up being apparently fraudulent or inauthentic, I sat down and took a look at what information had been provided to us, and there were a lot of inconsistencies in the postings that should have been red flags that the postings were not genuine. This post is intended for administrators of job boards as they review unsolicited postings to assist them in identifying what jobs may be worth double-checking.

A Guide to Mastodon

Published by Dave on April 20, 2017

A beginner's guide to microblogging on Mastodon (opensource.com)

Meet Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative that's spreading like wildfire.

Reading A beginner’s guide to microblogging on Mastodon by Seth Kenlon and testing the “Link” WordPress Format and the “Like” IndieWeb Post Kind. I’ve been trying out Mastodon as a Twitter alternative for a few days and find it pretty interesting, although I find myself following nearly as many GNU Social users as I do…

Site Updated

Site Updated

Published by Dave on April 19, 2017

This site has been updated to a new theme – ZenPress – which will hopefully be a more usable day-to-day site than the former too-structured format this site had used. It’s my hope to continue to bring content that I’ve posted around the web in here for this to serve as my main website. Some…

Tumblr RSS Feed Breakdown

Tumblr RSS Feed Breakdown

Published by Dave on July 31, 2015

Tumblr RSS Feed Breakdown (blog.trdaisuke)

With every Tumblelog (Tumblog?), Tumblr provides a variety of RSS feeds to follow.

Launch of This Site

Launch of This Site

Published by Dave on May 3, 2015

Hello, world! I’ve started putting together my site and hope to add additional information here shortly. But first, I want to give a huge thanks all the people who contributed to making this site possible: – Dreamhost, my excellent web host – Wordpress, the creators of a wonderful CMS – Start Bootstrap, who designed this…

ThinkUp on OpenShift: Easy as Pie

Published by Dave on April 30, 2015

I’ve been interested in setting up my own instance of the open-source social networking analysis tool ThinkUp for awhile now, but I have tried a few things without success:

I have a shared hosting account with Dreamhost, and I tried to install ThinkUp as a subdomain there, but unfortunately the shared hosting plan is known to be incompatible with busy ThinkUp accounts (and the initial crawl is a pretty busy process).
I tried installing ThinkUp on a LAMP stack on a VPS, but apparently I missed something in the setup process and MySQL would not allow ThinkUp to connect. (I’m sure I was making a noob error somewhere in there – probably skipped a simple step – but I couldn’t figure out what I was missing despite extensive Googling.)
I also tried installing ThinkUp on top of a Docker-based LAMP stack, but something timed out in the initial crawl there again.

Yeah, I’m a bit of a hack at this. But even a hack like me was able to find something I could get to work:

FreeNAS Boot Corruption Recovery