History Of John’s Tech Blog

I’ve had websites since maybe the 1990’s.  They all came and went.   And I foolishly lost some of my better ones when Apple’s Me.com just dried up one day.

In 2012 I bought my very first Raspberry Pi and made it into a LogitechMediaServer (LMS) streaming device.  Since Pi’s were in their infancy any project that I did I would take notes and document it on a web site.   John’s Tech blog was a repository for me to recreate my projects more easily when they broke and I needed to rebuild or restore them.

I started on Go Daddy and moved over to another web host in 2018.  I would document my projects on Linux or review some piece of hardware I bought.  Also in 2018 I was working on trying to install a digital decoder on Raspberry Pi that someone else developed called OP25.

OP25 was essentially a decoder for P25 radio Phase I and Phase II.  Think “police scanner”.  OP25 was hard and it literally took me about a year to figure it out.  I’d work on it for a week, give up, and then take a month off.   The first time I heard the sweet sounds of my local police force I documented everything and called it OP25 for Dummies.

I had NOTHING to do with the development of OP25.  All I did was to document how to install it on a Pi.  And to my surprise that site got EXPOSURE.  I was suddenly known to a select group of geeks who were baffled by how to configure OP25.  I’d like to think I made it easy for a lot of people to install.  To this day I still get a reasonable amount of email about it.

Gear Review

All this while I was buying tech items and reviewing them.  I didn’t do unboxing videos and I didn’t repeat specs you could easily look up on the manufactures website.  I tried hard not to be redundant.  I focus on the everyman approach to tech.  Did I like it?  Did I hate it?  Did I find a way to exploit it and use it in other ways?  Somehow that caught on a little bit over time.

Somewhere around 2020 or 2021 people started sending me things to review.  Mostly desktop diode lasers.  And that leads me to today where I still get regularly contacted to review hardware items from lasers to office chairs and all things in between.

Success?

In a world of viral videos and millions of hits and likes I get anywhere from 20,000 to 25,000 hits a month which tickles me to death.  And I review at least a few things a month.  As I write this 2 lasers, are inbound in addition to some smart blinds.

I’m a retired guy who did Electronics and Optical Landing systems for the government.  I don’t want John’s Tech Blog to turn into a full time job with overtime,  but I do love writing and reviewing all things Tech.  Thanks to everyone who sends me gear to review and I do my utmost best to be fair and honest.  The very few times I have received tech that was unsatisfactory I just box it up and send it back and don’t publish.  I’m out to make friends, and not enemies.

Having said that, If I buy it with my own money and it turns out to be awful then by golly, they get to read about that.

God Bless All,

John