Alex Laird

Chicagoland

Leader • Software Creator • Visionary • Learner • [he/him] Engineer @ Twilio

Most commented posts

  1. Reagan.com Email is a Misguided Effort — 87 comments
  2. DD-WRT Guest Wireless — 42 comments
  3. DD-WRT NAT Loopback Issue — 12 comments
  4. Booting Linux from a USB Drive on Apple Hardware — 3 comments
  5. A Correction for the WSJ: So, Who Did Invent the Internet? — 3 comments

Author's posts

The Napster Revolution

I’ve recently been reading through Steve Jobs’ biography, a phenomenal work by Walter Isaacson. A point that Isaacson keeps coming back to throughout the book is that Steve Jobs revolutionized six different industries: animated movies (through Pixar), personal computing, tablet computing, phones, digital publishing, and music. I don’t disagree with Isaacson. Jobs did revolutionize the …

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Reagan.com Email is a Misguided Effort

I heard a commercial with the booming and illustrious voice of Rush Limbaugh. After I recovered from banging my head against my desk, I reflected on what was said in the commercial. Rush pointed to the popular free email providers (Yahoo, Google, and others) to remind you that they scan your email. To remind you …

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Using VirtualBox to Host a VPS

Oracle’s VM VirtualBox is a virtualization program that allows you to run another operating system from within your native operating system. Though it is most commonly used to run fully functional operating systems such as Linux or OS X from within Windows 7 (or vice versa), it can also be used to host a Virtual …

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Ernie’s Adventure

What … Is This? If you’re like my brother and me, you love old-timey computer games almost more than the latest and greatest shoot-em-up.  For as long as I can remember, my brother and I have loved playing classic puzzle games like King’s Quest, Commander Keen (yah, I realize that’s not really a puzzle game), …

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The End of an Era for NASA

STS-135: The Final (Shuttle) Launch This morning marked the beginning of the end of an era.  I say the beginning of the end because the era does not conclusively close until next week, when the Space Shuttle Atlantis returns safely the Earth. The beginning of the end happened at 11:29 A.M. EST as Atlantis’ rocket …

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McDonnel Douglas F/A-18 Hornet

The Fighter/Attack series is one most people are familiar with, and probably the most well-know set of aircraft the Unites States Navy and Air Force produce.  Unfortunately, the understood distinctions between each aircraft are not that well known.  Most commonly, all fighter aircraft are referred to as an F-16.  If you don’t believe me, just …

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Boeing AH-64 Apache

Has there ever been a moment in your life in which you’ve seen something and your thought has been, “This is it … I’m about to die.”  Perhaps you’ve been out hiking and you’ve seen some form of wildlife.  Maybe it’s been when you stood on the edge of a massive cliff (I felt this …

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Lockheed C-130 Hercules

My brother and I have always had an obsession with airplanes, spacecraft, and NASA that borders on the unhealthy.  Our obsessive endeavors have taken us annually to the Quad City Air Show, where we have drooled at our magnificent dreams hovering just before our eyes. This year’s edition of the Quad City Air Show is …

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The Question Project

Music, as defined by Webster, is “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity.” This has come to be the generally accepted definition of music. However, Webster also defines music as, “An agreeable sound.” Sound, by its second …

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Booting Linux from a USB Drive on Apple Hardware

After hours of frustration and failure, I finally set up a USB bootable Linux distribution that worked on both a BIOS-based PC or EFI-based Apple system. Ten minutes later, I repeated the process with a second distribution. I’ve been perusing this fine internet of hours all day, reviewing and attempting to complete step-by-step tutorials that …

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