Tec(h)tonic

Insights into building a solid I.T. foundation in the mid-size business world.

Category: How To

  • Free VMs for Internet Explorer/Edge testing

    Here’s a great resource to be aware of: Microsoft maintains a collection of freely-downloadable VMs, for a variety of OS/VM platforms, that enable you to test your web development against different combinations of MS Windows/IE. Options available for Windows, Mac and Linux-centric VM hosts! https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/  

  • Send SMS messages from the command line

    This is, pretty much, my favorite discovery of 2016 so far: a freely-available API to send SMS text messages. Called TextBelt (http://textbelt.com/), it uses the *nix curl command to send a line of text and a specified phone number. I’ve started to use this with some of my server scripts set up to notify me…

  • Mac OS X: Speed up Terminal.app startup

    Being a sysadmin, I find myself in the terminal pretty frequently. And, since I’m using a Mac, I’m using the included Terminal.app. One thing that constantly annoys me is the fact that, the more you use the app, the more slowly it starts up. Like, there can be a ten second wait after the terminal…