Gray, a writer.
Caddy is a tool I use for home lab HTTPS management. However, the tool is not bulletproof. It’s not a simple GUI tool to add services and forget. One such problem Caddy can introduce with HTTPS is during the challenge to obtain a certificate. Because the certificate has to be renewed periodically, even if it…
My Seerr started acting up after the migration. In the web UI, it threw “Movie Not Found” errors — not on everything, but, evidently, only on some of the movies in the library and some of the entries in trending. Both LAN and WAN were working fine. The errors weren’t persistent. They came and went,…
Pythonista, coupled with LLM for vibe coding, is a great way to play around with making your apps come true quickly. No need to pay for a developer account or register it. However, being an iOS Python IDE, there are limitations on what it can mimic. One such limitation was disabling Auto-Lock while a script…
In a home lab environment, the server is bound to go through more changes than conservatively-run enterprise counterparts. It is, after all, part of the experience. And one core difference in approach between the two environments is downtime. In the corporate world, server downtime is lost revenue. In the home lab world, well-architected downtime is…
Synology DSM has been shipped with a Docker Engine for a while, but it failed to keep up with the latest version of Docker Engine, let alone stay within the EOL life cycle. DSM was given an updated 24.0.2 of Docker Engine in February 2025, the version already declared EOL in June 2024. At the…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Just last year, browser extension Honey suffered an infamous scandal. Now owned by PayPal, the extension promised to find the best deal, including finding the best coupon codes. The exposé revealed Honey’s business model focused more on being a man in the middle in both security and transaction. And it also reveals a gap, a…
It was always possible to set more complex repeating pattern using Shortcuts. However, at least from my experience, Shortcuts automation do fail horrendously, when it needs to run in the background. These are some edge cases that I have the latest Reminders could not handle on its own: Weather related pattern (needs a weather app)…
On iOS, Pythonista is likely the go-to Python environment runtime for many script writers. I, for one, recommend using Pythonista for any projects that need some horsepower. As I have shared many times, one such problem was generating passwords. It is completely doable on Shortcuts, only that it would be so cumbersome to make it…