I recently went through the process of switching web hosting providers for my WordPress blog. I did not consider using AWS mainly because I already had enough candidate providers and was trying to avoid decision fatigue. Now that I have been investigating the capabilities of AWS, I found that I could have set up my own web host on AWS!

There are easy-to-follow instructions for two of the most popular web hosting packages, cPanel and Plesk. I already had experience with cPanel on my web hosting provider, so I decided to give Plesk a try. Here is what I did to get a sample web page running.

1. Set up Plesk using the published instructions.
2. Figure out what domain that you want to use for your site. I set up a subdomain, plesk.michaelwlind.com, for my sample site.
3. Open the Plesk control panel and select Websites & Domains.
4. Click Add Domain.
5. Fill out the form. Be sure to tick the box to encrypt the web page!
6. Click OK, and before you know it, you will have a sample web page running on your domain!

Plesk and cPanel are designed to easily run many web sites. At the moment, I am only running my own web site, so both packages exceed my requirements. If you are responsible for a number of sites and want to roll your own web hosting control panel, give Plesk or cPanel on AWS a try!

I have used WordPress as a blogging platform since 2007 on a couple of different hosting providers. Now that I am exploring the features of Amazon Web Services, I wanted to give WordPress a try on AWS.

Thanks to the Bitnami WordPress package that Amazon provides, setting up a WordPress blog on AWS is straightforward. There is a Quick Start document that extremely helpful, but there is one critical step missing from the instructions. More on that, below.

If you want to try out WordPress on AWS, I’ve put together my own instructions.

1. Go to your AWS Management Console and click on Build using Virtual Servers.
2. Select Linux/Unix as the platform.
3. Select WordPress
4. Scroll down to select your hosting plan. I went with the free for one month plan.
5. Give your instance a name.
6. Click on Create Instance.
7. Go to your Lightsail home and wait for your WordPress instance to begin running.
8. Follow Amazon’s Quick Start Guide to get access into your site.
9. The one critical step that is missing from the Quick Start Guide is to configure your site for SSL encryption. Fortunately, there is documentation on how to do it. Follow that process after “Step 4: Map your domain name to your WordPress website” in the Quick Start Guide. I submitted an issue for the missing step on GitHub, so hopefully this omission will be fixed soon.
10. Once you have your SSL certificate installed, you can finish up with steps 5 & 6 of the Quick Start Guide.

There are plenty of resources on the web that cover the steps to configure WordPress (such as this one), so I won’t go into that process here. If you need more AWS-specific instructions, there are useful tutorials in the Bitnami documentation.

The end result of this project was awsblog.michaelwlind.com. I consider it a development site at this point and will be duplicating my AWS-related blog entries there.

The majority of my information technology experience has been with physical hardware like desktops, servers, routers and switches. Although I run this blog on a server located somewhere on the Internet, it is really just one of many WordPress sites on a single shared server rather than a cloud application.

To get some experience with cloud technologies, I decided to give Amazon Web Services, or AWS, a try. The account is free and there are a number of free-to-try applications and services.

My first project was setting up a virtual desktop using Amazon WorkSpaces. Setting up the AWS account on the portal was simple. Once I logged in, I followed Amazon’s instructions to set up a WorkSpace and log in credentials. There are a number of different Linux and Windows options to choose from. I selected the free Windows 10 desktop and downloaded the WorkSpaces clients for Mac and iPad.

It took about 20 minutes for the desktop to be set up before I could log in. It was a thrill getting the virtual Windows 10 desktop running on my Mac without the overhead of running virtualization software.

The free tier WorkSpace that I set up was bare bones. It had Firefox and Internet Explorer and the basic Windows 10 utilities. There are other non-free tiers that offer Microsoft Office and additional computing power.

To test adding applications, I downloaded Notepad++ and did a little text editing. The process worked just as it would on a regular desktop.

I couldn’t resist trying out the WorkSpaces client on my iPad. It was a little awkward trying to use it without a mouse or keyboard (which are supported). Many of the keyboard functions that you need, like the Windows key, are available by swiping your thumb from the left side of the screen. It took a little practice to get the swipe action down. My first attempts ended in weird things happening! I found that the trick is to slide your thumb and continue holding it on the screen until it is on the function that you want.

I don’t think that I would ever want to use the iPad as a primary way of accessing a virtual desktop, but it is nice to have it as an option.

Now that I have an Amazon WorkSpace running, my next task is to figure out what to do with it. I could see it being useful for editing documents in multiple locations on multiple systems, without having to lug around a laptop. It hearkens back to the days when people didn’t carry laptops at all, and instead relied upon X terminals or the VT100 terminals wherever they went!

While troubleshooting a connection issue on my home network, I noticed that there was a device connected to my 10/100/1,000 Mbps Ethernet switch that was connecting at less than 1,000 Mbps. It was the Insteon Hub model 2245-222 that I had installed a few months ago.

Was there something wrong with the connection that prevented it from connecting at a gigabit per second, or was the interface on the hub not gigabit capable? My gigabit switch only indicates if the connection is 10/100 or 1,000 Mbps. The hub’s manual didn’t say what the interface speed was. An Internet search seemed to indicate that the interface may only be capable of 10 Mbps, but I had to know for sure!

I dug a 10 Mbps hub and a 100 Mbps switch out of my box of antiquities and did some testing. The hub was able to connect at 10 or 100 Mbps, but not at 1,000 Mbps. Mystery solved!

For posterity, here is what the LEDs on the Insteon Hub model 2245-222 Ethernet interface mean:

I finished off the testing by printing my own labels for the hub!

Thanks to extensive media coverage, I virtually visited CES 2020. Most of the articles I read and videos I viewed were published by Engadget and The Wall Street Journal.

There were plenty of products that I found interesting, but I was deflinitely not interested in 8K TVs. I am a slow adopter when it comes to TVs. My family room TV was a 480i CRT until it died. Now I have a 1080p set. I will have it until it dies and will I buy whatever set has a decent price / performance point at that time.

What I was interested in was an odd array of potentially very useful and at the very least distracting products.

Segway S-Pod

I have followed Segway for years and so I had to take a look at the Segway S-Pod. Engadget called it a “ridiculous lounge chair on wheels, but I wouldn’t go that far. I really enjoy riding the original Segways, and now I can do it sitting down! If there were a plastic bubble around the front, I could see myself riding one of these to work.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus

When it comes to reading on an electronic device, I greatly prefer using an E Ink device over an LCD screen. I have both a Kindle and iPad, and the E Ink on the Kindle is so much easier on the eyes. E Ink also uses far less power than a backlit LCD screen, which makes it ideal when you want to constantly display something. That is why the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus is so intriguing to me. It combines a regular laptop with an E Ink screen on the lid. The screen can be used to read books, display your calendar, or display anything else that you want frequent access to. The Engadget article points out that the display is not a Kindle, but instead can be used to display output from a Kindle application. I could see this being a great device for commuters to carry.

Bosch Virtual Visor

The Bosch Virtual Visor has the most potential to improve my life. There have been so many times when I was driving and had my vision obscured by a standard sun visor. The Virtual Visor only blocks the area of the visor needed to keep the sun out of your eyes. The rest of the visor remains clear. As the car or sun move, the spot moves to compensate. Nice!

The Engadget article has more. So far, the Virtual Visor is only in the prototype stage. Hopefully it will be available on my next car!

The Box

The Box by LivingPackets intrigues me because it takes the idea of a reusable shipping container that rides on the back of a semi trailer and shrinks it down to a size that can sit on your front porch. It adds some electronics and an E Ink display to make tracking a breeze. I don’t see it working well for one-time shipments, but if you frequently buy from an online store, these could really reduce the cardboard that goes into the recycling bin. A picture does not do The Box justice, so check out the video.

Samsung Ballie

What is the Samsung Ballie? Is it a robot? A pet? A personal assistant? A spy camera? It seems to be all of those things rolled up into a ball. I think that I would treat it as a pet virtual assistant that follows me around the house. It would be fun and creepy at the same time. I am scratching my head about one thing: I could see it being built strong enough to make it down the stairs, but how is it going to roll back up?

The Future

Where will all of these ideas and products go? Often, things that are showcased at CES either never make it to market, or they are short lived. I am going to keep an eye on them to find out!

Microsoft issued its last official updates to Windows 7 on January 14, 2020, but you can still update your Windows 7 system to Windows 10 at no cost.

I have a tower PC that I built in late 2010. When I built it, I installed Windows 7 Pro. With the end of support date in the far-away year of 2020, I figured that the hardware would surely die before Windows 7 Pro was no longer supported. Surprisingly, the hardware kept chugging along. As January 14th approached, I debated whether to retire the system to my pile of obsolete hardware that I call my computer museum. Based on an article that I read, I decided to keep the hardware as a production system and attempt an in-place upgrade. Here is the process that I followed.

1. Save an image of your C: drive to a USB hard drive. I used the free version of Macrium Reflect.
2. Disconnect the USB hard drive with your C: drive image from your computer. You should not need it, but you can’t be too careful when you are upgrading Windows.
3. Make sure that you have your Windows 7 product key handy. You can use ProduKey to determine what the key is if you don’t have a hard copy of your key. Make sure that you have an offline copy of the key. I didn’t need my key, but you can’t be too careful when you are upgrading Windows.
4. Download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool.
5. Run the Media Creation Tool to write the media to a USB flash drive. Your drive will need to hold at least 8 Gbytes of data.
6. Keep the USB flash drive inserted in the system, and run the setup.exe file on the drive.
7. Run through the Windows 10 installation wizard. it will tell you if you have enough free disk space on your C: drive. I had 83 Gbytes free and didn’t have any issues.
8. After multiple restarts, your PC will have Windows 10 installed.
9. Verify that Windows 10 is activated by going to Start -> Settings and searching for activation. You should see this statement:

That is it! I was a little worried about weird system behavior after an in-place upgrade, but so far everything is working great! I have had no driver issues. I am in the process of verifying correct operation of all of the programs on the system, and so far I have found only one old motherboard fan speed utility that wouldn’t run.

If you still have an old Windows 7 system and don’t want to put it out to pasture, give this procedure a try!

I finally did it! I finally ditched my old Linux hosting account and replaced it with up-to-date technology.

My old account had been marked as “legacy” by my old hosting provider for years. It still worked, but as I dutifully updated WordPress, I received warnings about PHP being out of date. I tried upgrading PHP, but I could only go up to version 5.6.

That version had been released in 2014 and went out of support at the end of 2018. No more security updates were being done, so the upgrade was past due!

There was one other feature that I decided was critical to have: SSL encryption. Google started flagging web sites without SSL as insecure in 2018, so once again, my site was out of date.

I could have come up with a lot of other requirements to check for as I looked for a new hosting provider, but my must-have requirements were pretty simple:

1. Linux hosting
2. Up-to-date server software
3. SSL

I created a short list of hosting providers by seeing what companies were used by various blogs that have good web performance. The final selection came down to the hosting provider with the most features for the lowest price.

To ensure that the site move was successful, I practiced doing the move with a site that wasn’t live and used the results to create a method of procedure (MOP) for the production site move.

The only significant hurdle that I ran into was installing my WordPress theme, Thesis, onto the new hosting provider. My version was 1.8.9. It was released in 2016 and it was no longer being updated. That was a problem because this version was throwing fatal PHP errors with the new version of PHP. Fortunately, I found an article that explained how to modify the code to be compatible.

My site was working, but I decided that I needed to replace my WordPress theme with something that is currently supported. The latest version of Thesis was more than I needed. After plenty of searching and playing around with other themes, I decided on MH TechMagazine from MH Themes. With a couple of CSS modifications, I was able to get the free version to render a page the way I wanted. Thanks to a responsive design, the site displays well on desktop, tablet and phone:

Everything on the site is now live! My new hosting provider has plenty of options for PHP:

I was able to select a PHP version that WordPress Health Check reported as ok:

SSL is configured and working:

And WordPress Health Check reports that everything is running great:

Now I can get back to the business of blogging!

Off and on for a number of years, I have looked for a WordPress widget that could display my public activity from Twitter, Google+ and YouTube on my blog. I had used Twitter Widget Pro with great success with Twitter, but I wanted something that worked with other social networks.  I tried a number of different plugins and services, including FriendFeed, Lifestream and several Google+ specific plugins, but none worked quite the way I wanted.

On my last search attempt, I found an article by Charnita Fance at ManageWP that finally pointed me to one I like: WordPress Social Stream by Design Chemical.  It works with plain RSS feeds and 14 different social networks, including Twitter, Google+ and YouTube.  Besides just text, it can also insert thumbnails from your posts.

The plugin is fully customizable, including choosing your social networks, height of the stream and scroll speed.  You can customize the text using custom CSS.  If you want a full page, you can create a Pinterest-style social media wall.  The plugin also lets you create multiple different streams for different purposes on your WordPress site.

The plugin costs $14 at CodeCanyon.  After all of the frustration I had with free plugins that didn’t do what I wanted or just didn’t work, the price was worth it.

I only had one issue with installation.  I could not get my Tumblr stream to display.  I contacted the developer and had a code fix by the end of the day!

I’ve put a full-sized screen shot of a social stream below this article.  For a live version, just look to your right on this page!

I’ve written before that I rely upon the search feature in Microsoft Outlook.  There are many times a day that I search for an important email.  Usually, the search finds just what I need, but every once in a while I see this message:

Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed

The incomplete results wouldn’t be so bad, but too often the indexing never finishes.

The recommendation from Microsoft is to rebuild the index when it appears that Outlook has stopped indexing.  The procedure is easy enough, but if you have tens of thousands of emails to index, it will take hours and you won’t be able to search for anything during that time.

I wanted to find a quicker fix and wondered if the indexing process just needed a restart.  A blog entry at nerdgrind.com gave me the direction I needed to put together a quicker-to-implement solution than Microsoft’s.

1. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools
2. Double click Services
3. Find Windows Search
4. Right click Windows Search and select restart
5. Close Services
6. Wait a few seconds or minutes for the indexing to complete.

Since I started using this procedure, I’ve had no large blocks of time where I couldn’t search my email.

Now, if only I could find a way to keep Windows Search from stopping in the first place!

My work email client is Microsoft Outlook 2007.  I long ago gave up trying to file or categorize mail.  Instead, once I am done with a message I either file it in a misc folder or delete it.  The reason this approach works for me is because of the search function built into Outlook.

Usually, the message I am looking for was sent in the last 30 days.  Unfortunately, Outlook can’t search the last 30 days.  It can search last month or this month, but there is no search command for the last 30 days.

In the past, I used search strings like:

subject:"staff meeting" received:(thismonth OR lastmonth)

but I’ve found a better way.  My new favorite search technique is to look in the days since one month ago.  So, if it is April 2, I look for anything sent after March 2:

subject:"staff meeting received:>3/2

The string is quicker to type and I don’t have to wait for Outlook to slog through years of emails.

One word of caution: If you try to search from 2/29 in a non-leap year, Outlook will search for a very long time and find nothing.

Now, if Microsoft could just add a received:last30days option!