Blog
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Deploying DNS over HTTPS on Windows Server 2025, and the Three Things the Docs Skip
A real-world walkthrough of enabling DNS over HTTPS on the Windows Server 2025 DNS role, with verification evidence and the three gotchas the official guide leaves out.
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Why Your Electric Bill Is About to Get Weirder
The conclusion of a four-part series. What the coming grid changes mean for your electric bill, why capacity prices are about to flow into residential rates, and what ordinary ratepayers can actually do about any of it.
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Why AI Might Not Get the Power It Needs
The AI buildout is unlike anything the grid has absorbed before, and the companies building it are not waiting for permission. What happens when private timelines, regulatory gaps, and gigawatt-scale demand all collide. Part 3 of a series.
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The Grid Behind the Grid
How the North American power grid actually works, why it almost broke catastrophically in 2003, and why a brand new kind of customer is recreating the conditions for cascade failures on purpose. Part 2 of a series.
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What My Electric Bill Taught Me About the Coming Grid Crisis
How a simple decision about when to run my dishwasher pulled me into a rabbit hole about how the entire North American power grid works, and the quiet crisis most people don’t realize is happening. Part 1 of a series.
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Why I’m Dumping my Windows Phone
I’m an avid Windows Mobile user going back to the Windows Mobile 6.0 days with my Motorola Q9m. I loved that phone; one of the most reliable phones I have ever used. I then found myself upgrading along the way to the HTC 8X, but reliability issues forced me to abandon it. When the Nokia…
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Diary of a Garmin BITS Job Gone Bad
It’s one of those e-mails that no one ever wants to receive… Dear AT&T High Speed Internet Service Customer, We want to remind you that your AT&T High Speed Internet service includes 150 gigabytes (GB) of data for each billing period.. You have exceeded 150 GB this billing period What?!? Of course, I believe it…
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Allowing FTP over HTTP with Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway
I’ve been working with Microsoft’s Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) since it was released back in November 2009 and it continues to surprise me… What I thought would be an easy protocol addition to an existing access rule turned out not to be the case. I was notified of an issue whereby users were suddenly…
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IP2MAC
In all previous instances when working with Windows NLB (Network Load Balancing) I have always used Unicast. Recently, I ran into a scenario where Unicast was not allowed in a VMWare environment, which forced the use of Multicast instead. Apparently, using VMotion works with Multicast as opposed to using Unicast. Note: For a detailed description…
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My Worst Flight
It was Thanksgiving in 1991 and my family and I agreed that for our family reunion in Florida that I would fly everyone down in a small single-engine four-seater Piper Turbo Arrow. I had been flying for several years and I had around 200 hours of flight time and I had just obtained my instrument…
Mike Howells's Blog 