Extracurricular Activities

My Network Upgrades with UniFi & Xfinity for Better At-Home Work and School

Most home networks are fine for watching TV, playing video games, and casual web browsing. Your internet service provides all the equipment and bandwidth necessary for you to be “connected.” What I had set up at home certainly used to fit within that “good enough” category. That’s no longer true. Since the pandemic started, I’ve […]

Why You Should Use Component-Based Design in Unity

Traditionally, inheritance is leveraged within object-oriented programming to reuse code without rewriting it. In Unity, however, it’s better to use a composition-based approach. At a high level, components in Unity are just C# scripts that can be added onto a GameObject; they can be designed and implemented in many ways. Building up game features using […]

Self-Hosting Your Own Cloud – Part 8: Monitoring Your Internet Traffic with ntopng

Recently, I discovered that a family member’s device on my home network had been DNS-hijacked. This was only brought to my attention because some sites on that machine were resolving to fraudulent servers. This made me concerned about what the other devices on my network may be up to. I decided to do some research […]

Self-Hosting Your Own Cloud – Part 7: Building a Personal Private Network with WireGuard

About a year ago, I wrote about how to use OpenVPN to provide secure remote access to your home network and its resources to start building your own private cloud. I have been incrementally adding network services since. Recently, I’ve started using WireGuard instead of OpenVPN. I’ve found that the configuration is far simpler, while […]