High Level Tech Intro Archives — Eric Burns Online

Vibe Coding a WordPress Plugin – What Worked and What Didn’t, plus What I Paid Attention To

I use vibe coding more and more lately as see opportunities to safely leverage it. There are areas where I’m hesitant to use it though. Not because I didn’t think it worked, but because of information security concerns. I’ve spent enough time writing code across different languages and environments to…

Hidden Data Risks When Recycling Old PCs

Besides the obvious risk posed by an old 3.5 inch hard drive, there are several easy to miss ways that retired computers can leak sensitive information. These mistakes can expose intellectual property, customer records, or employee data to the public, or worse, to competitors. The resulting spear phishing attacks…

Google Dorking Against the Competition

February 19, 2025 High Level Tech Intro Sales Engineers SE Skills Uncategorized No Comments

Google Dorking is essentially the art of using advanced searchess in Google (and other search engines) to find specific information that is normally not readily visible through regular searches. By crafting specific search queries, you can find hidden documents and data. Granted it can be used for cybercriminals for nefarious…

API Guides Are Not Textbooks, Don’t Expect Your Users To Use Them That Way

January 18, 2025 High Level Tech Intro Startups Technical Tutorials & Developer Education No Comments

Your users will come to your solution with a wide variety of experiences and knowledge. They’ll also enter the documentation on a specific page likely based on their initial query into Google. This isn’t a call to better leverage SEO in your API docs, nor is it one to dumb…

ECHOGEAR Open Rack

December 27, 2024 Gear High Level Tech Intro No Comments

My home lab has evolved over the years. It’s gone down from a half rack with some nice 4U cases on rails to a few systems on the desk. Those “few” systems have started to grow and I’ve also wanted to free up a bit more desk space. During my…

Getting RAID Inside a Dell

November 25, 2024 Gear High Level Tech Intro No Comments

Note: This article uses Affiliate Links. I’ll earn a small commission, at no cost to you, if you purchase items through those links. Since I’m using the items and found them worthwhile, I feel I am still in integrity with my goals by doing this. Lately I’ve gotten into using…

Crowview Note – First Impressions

October 12, 2024 Gear High Level Tech Intro No Comments

A Kickstarter for the CrowView Note came across one of my social media feeds. It basically is a rechargeable 14″ screen, keyboard and trackpad with a handful of ports. It can be used to extend the screen of many modern mobile phones while also charging them. It also works for…

ChatGPT Coding – I Did It, and Have No Regrets

August 30, 2024 Attitude High Level Tech Intro Technical Tutorials & Developer Education No Comments

I first learned to program in the 6th grade. Since then I’ve spent time as an IT Engineer and System Architect. Prior to joining Cisco, I worked with Perl, shell scripting, Aspect, Expect, Tcl/Tk and a few others I’ve forgotten. We started with Perl when I was at Cisco, then…

RaspberryPi and Safecracking

May 13, 2024 Creative Projects Raspberry Pi No Comments

Two friends both have a safe or two where they don’t know the combination – either the family member that owned it has passed, or they’ve forgotten it. I’ve read about using a Single Board Computer (like a Raspberry Pi) and a stepper motor to manually do the different combinations.…

In the IoT Space, Is It a Microcontroller or What?

April 23, 2024 Creative Projects High Level Tech Intro Random Notes Technical Tutorials & Developer Education No Comments

I’m working on an introductory article related to building IoT devices. With that I’m trying to use simpler and non-threatening language that is reasonably accurate. Since I’ll be referencing some common open source hardware as a way of getting started learning, I’m having a hard time with how to classify…