YuenX

Review: Beelink U57 vs X55 Mini PCs

By Michael Yuen @yuenx|2021-09-09T22:22:41-07:00May 26, 2020 - Tuesday|Product Reviews, Reviews|

Read: 12 mins. Half a year ago, I chose the Beelink Gemini X55 Mini PC as a TV-connected, video conferencing system that would fit inside a drawer. The coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic a few months later had the family utilize it more for school, work, and video chats with friends and family, resulting in a noticeable drop in performance. Beelink recently released the Core i5-based U57 model that promised better speed for just $50 more. How did it compare?

Review: Goal Zero Yeti 500x Portable Power Station

By Michael Yuen @yuenx|2023-10-13T17:21:53-07:00May 9, 2020 - Saturday|Product Reviews, Reviews|

Read: 19 mins. Goal Zero products are expensive. They are also the industry leader in portable power stations with a safety record to brag about. After having reviewed a handful of batteries, I finally took the plunge to look at the newly-released Yeti 500x. What I learned over the past five weeks surprised me.

Active Directory: Group and Membership Changes – Windows Event IDs, Auditing, Splunk (Bonus: Security Events for Investigation, Audit)

By Michael Yuen @yuenx|2023-03-08T11:21:04-08:00May 1, 2020 - Friday|Security, Technology|

Read: 13 mins. How do you find out who made a change to an Active Directory or Builtin Local Group? Which users were added to or removed from a group? When was a group deleted? In this post, we look at Group and Membership change Event IDs, and explore how to use Splunk to find relevant information to aid in your investigations.

Review: CORE Instant Cabin 9-Person Tent

By Michael Yuen @yuenx|2023-11-03T17:42:36-07:00Apr 29, 2020 - Wednesday|Product Reviews, Reviews|

Read: 10 mins. For this review, my son and I took the CORE 9 Instant Cabin Tent out to the backyard for three days and two nights after he was disappointed our Sequoia National Park camping trip had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a perfect opportunity for some father-son bonding, to test out our new tent, put some of my other gear to use, and to get some sense of normalcy back into our lives.

Cisco Umbrella: SSO Login Issues

By Michael Yuen @yuenx|2022-10-12T12:13:24-07:00Apr 24, 2020 - Friday|Microsoft 365, Networking, Security, Technology|

Read: 6 mins. We have recently enabled Single-Sign On (SSO) for our Cisco Umbrella dashboard and had to convert the existing, non-SSO accounts to use SSO. What should have been a straight-forward process was greeted with login issues and an inexplicable association with the OpenDNS dashboard. Here is how we secured the accounts and got SSO to work for each of them.

Review: Jackery Explorer 1000 Portable Power Station

By Michael Yuen @yuenx|2023-10-13T17:22:01-07:00Apr 17, 2020 - Friday|Product Reviews, Reviews|

Read: 19 mins. Jackery, a young company founded as recently as 2012, is one of Amazon's top sellers in the portable power station category. Its newest, most powerful battery was just released in 2020: the "Explorer 1000". In this review, the high-capacity power station will be dissected to see what makes the company's products so appealing.