Back when the internet was mostly a thing of the government and academics, and when Microsoft DOS (and later DOS/Windows 3.1) ruled the corporate desktop (along with Word Perfect as the defacto word processor and Lotus 123 as the main spreadsheet), there was a different 900 pound gorilla

In 2009, when I first installed our phone at the house the very first phone call was from Verizon - "We are installing fiber in your neighborhood very soon, if you are interested in buying Verizon Fios press 1 now".  You better believe I smashed the 1 touchtone button as

After about two years online, my BBS at https://bbs.kn6q.org [https://bbs.kn6q.org]is now on FidoNet.  FidoNet was (and still is) the largest BBS network in the world.  My node number is: 1:130/330 Here is the announcement on the BBS: 73, Tom

If you lookup Briar Texas in Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar,_Texas], it will tell you Briar is a "Census-designated place" which if you lookup is defined as a name of a location the Census Bureau uses to gather statistics for - but also they are usually "populated

Let's Encrypt certificate renewal automation is super simple and almost automatic on Linux.  Cerbot and plugins for applications pretty much take care of everything for you. Not so on Windows.  There are now several Windows Clients [https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/] that will do the certificate requests (I'm using Crypt-LE

I've added TradeWars 2002 Game Server to my BBS.  I've made it accessible from both inside and outside the BBS (outside the via telnet bbs.kn6q.org port 2002) and also on it's own web based telnet page at: The Desert Rats Sanctuary BBS TradeWars 2002 Game Server [https://bbs.

I have now successfully upgraded the machine running on my closet shelf that functions as my web and mail server, BBS, and amateur radio Winlink gateway.  It wasn't without incident, but nothing broke that couldn't be fixed. I should mention this follows upgrading my main workstation to Windows 11.  My

Part of the Synchronet telnet BBS I have setup (web access at https://bbs.kn6q.org) includes an IRC Server.  I wasn't ever particularly big into IRC (except for a little while on the VAX mainframe in college in about 1995).  After that, I would use it occasionally particularly when

This server is now running and RMS Packet Gateway and RMS Relay software, listening on 145.050 Currently running UZ7HO SoundModem 1.13 on a Kenwood V71A It's also running VARA FM in Narrow mode.  I hope to upgrade it to Wide mode in the near future.

I've upgraded this site (and https://troop243azle.org) to version 4.0 of the Ghost CMS [https://ghost.org/].  Once again, it did not completely trash the site (that's twice in a row!), and my custom theme worked with just one minor warning. However, after the upgrade I noticed the

My Troop 243 website [https://troop243azle.org] is officially an award winning website, lol (you'll notice I use the same theme that I modified/wrote and basic design as my personal website here).  Initially I didn't think getting 9th place (13th overall because of a 4-way tie for 8th) was

Sending e-mail with SMTP is one earliest internet services available, and was easily for me the first bit of "internet" that I had access to in the late '80s/early 1990s.  Back in the "good old days", standing up an SMTP server for sending e-mail was a trivial matter on

For a long time now, I've used Let's Encrypt's [https://letsencrypt.org/] free certificates because in the past, (like when Internic controlled all the domain names) they were too expensive to to justify using for a personal site.  Before Let's Encrypt I had tried another free certificate provider, but they