While routers are becoming ‘smarter’ day by day, some of the rather basic features are pushed back to the “Professional” department. One such feature is LAN management, specifically, static IP reservation. Single-source-of-truth dictates one authority for IP assignment — routers could be that authority. However, practically speaking, none of the consumer-level routers I’ve encountered have…
The Mad Tea Party
Inspiring yet Mad Spiels
How to Change Apple ID Region
Region-changing on old systems has become something of a quiet craze — remote work and streaming have made it a growing necessity that cannot be ignored anymore. Apple was relatively late to the game; as far as I know, the region-change program didn’t gain real traction until 2020. Now in 2026, the documentation is conflicting,…
How to Upgrade NVMe on Unsupported Synology NAS
Synology is known for making reliable HDD network storage, not NVMe. The few articles I found often recommended building your own NAS for NVMe, given the general reliability of SSD and price to performance ratio. While I agree on the principle, for those of us who already own a Synology branded NAS, there is no…
App to Discover IP Addresses for Proxy Switchers
If you are using a rule-based proxy switcher, checking IP addresses for each proxy could easily get out of hand. It is possible to stop the auto-routing and force the connection for manual testing, but that is not what I wanted to do with a browser extension. The website I recommend using for this occasion…
Quest to Find Ergonomic Keyboard of Today
Remember Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard? It was legendary in retrospect. It was a tenkeyless design with a detached numpad, yet fully functional as a full-sized keyboard. It didn’t need additional software to set up — it was pure plug and play. I had written simple configurations for Sculpt Keyboards before; it was a testament of what…
How to Band-aid Fix macOS Music App Freezing on Launch
The app in question is the Music app bundled with every Mac, not to be confused with the streaming service from the same company. And unfortunately, I was not able to narrow down what causes the issue. Upon opening the app, none of the UI is working. The only recourse, even though the app is…
“Ethical Concern” is AI Dunce Cap
Storage is at an all-time premium nowadays, with even the price of SSDs and HDDs being affected by AI craze. As much as I would love to say ‘rip the discs raw’, there is bound to be a real world limit on how much storage I can secure for a self-hosted media server. My search…