Tech on Jim Deibele's Blog

Ping Logger to monitor when internet is down

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:58:32 +0000

We have Ziply (formerly Frontier, formerly GTE) fiber at home and the other day I noticed that the internet wasn’t reachable. The eero app said the internet was down.

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Internet down in eero app

I checked the box (Optical Network Terminal) in the box and it showed green.

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After another minute or so, the connection resumed.

I don’t know how often this happens so I decided to monitor the internet connection from a server that’s running 24/7.

Forward Email for Your Domain to Your Email Using Improvmx

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 05:10:15 +0000

If you own a domain, perhaps your DNS host provides mail services. When I registered JimDeibele.com, I picked Netlify’s domain server and it doesn’t provide mail service.

I wanted to put blog@jimdeibele.com on here so I could be contacted without having to reveal my preferred email address. A year from now, maybe I want to switch to blog2@jimdeibele.com because there’s so much spam going to the first email address.

Improvmx provides a service where you can control mail for a domain. On the free plan, you can have up to 10 aliases, meaning “blog@yourdomain”, “help@yourdomain”, “bigboss@yourdomain” and so on. There’s also a catch-all option, written as “*”. That means that anything that doesn’t match an alias will be sent to the catch-all address.

Apple Photos - Please Give Me a Clue When Asking Me to Confirm Person!

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 11:04:27 -0800

I get the feeling that people at Apple didn’t have siblings. Or they only have 1 child.

Below is a picture of my daughter. But it looks a lot like her younger brother when he was the same age. A dad told me that kids would turn out to be very different and I’ve found that to be true for my kids.

But there are ages where they looked very much alike!

How to Block Ads on Your iPhone, iPad, and Laptop Easily, Effectively, and for Free

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using uBlock Origin for many years on my Mac. Recently, I tried replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2018 MacBook Pro. There were a lot of things that I liked about the new MacBook Pro but what bothered me was that it had only 8GB of RAM whereas the older one had 16GB.

I would listen to the fans howl and eventually I replaced it with a machine I described in The Perfect Mac. But as happy as I am with my Mac Mini, it’s not portable. So I added an iPad Pro to the mix. That’s been pretty good but the ad blocking on the iPad doesn’t seem anywhere as effective.