Gray, a writer.
More than a decade ago, I ran the ethernet ‘backbones’ for my home network: ones to connect the nodes, ones to connect workstations, and ones to connect media streaming devices. If I recall correctly, the fastest WiFi standard available at the time to be used to connect nodes-to-nodes, were either slightly slower or faster than…
I was quite surprised to see that there were inquiries into the recommendations for customizing sleep behaviors for macOS, as apparently some of the third-party apps fell short. Back in the 2000s, I would have said Caffeine without a doubt. It had not seen major updates for a while until it’s under the new ownership.…
I understand there are good scanning apps available on the App Store, but their life-time licenses are not competitively priced to that of specialized scanners for going paperless. One such brand known for book scanners and included scanning suite is Czur, and its scanner starts as low as $99 on Amazon; whereas, some of the…
Few weeks ago, I hinted a notion that I was waiting for a possible MacBook Pro update, more powerful chips and OLED displays preferably, and until then my Intel Mac Pro will have to do. Now that America has started worldwide trade war against every nations and unoccupied islands, it peaked my interest how others…
Ixion is a colony-building survival game features a colony ship. As an administrator of a space station Tiqqun, the player is tasked with the survival of the colony on the station and finding the next habitable planet for the humanity. I was introduced to the game as space-comparable of the original Frostpunk, and while I…
One of the nonsense I had to pull myself through during scanning old family albums was its lack of metadata. I could guess the date of when the photo might have been taken, but photo library apps of any kind would rely on time stamps as well to order the photos. In order to correctly…
Apple has added waterproof to iPhones since 2016. It’s been roughly 9 years since iPhones speakers had chance to be engulfed in water, yet Apple hasn’t provided an effective method to eject water from the speakers. Whereas, on Apple Watch, since 2022, watchOS has a built-in water ejection mechanism which plays specific tune of sounds…
I’m calling it a band-aid fix, because this is technically not a “fix”. As far as I could find, it is technically not possible to use mDNS (Bonjour) over VPN. Only when the remote client is bridged through VPN mDNS packets can reach the client, but it causes its own havoc, especially less useful for…
I’m still in the process of getting my photos scanned from a lab. It’s a long story; but to put it simply, it appears the lab was geared toward analog hobbyists, not mass album scanning. It would take few more weeks to get it all scanned. As for the restorative works, I don’t plan to…
I’ve talked about using dictionary in Shortcuts to handle data. If you started using one in a custom shortcut, there is one odd bit that may not be immediately obvious if you try to loop through the dictionary; it loops with the entire dictionary as the Repeat Item. It defeats the purpose of using iterating…
I recently started digitizing family albums; it was more or less a moral lesson on the importance of metadata. The lab did pull through. The stack of negative films my family had couldn’t be “scanned” in traditional sense, so we had them digitized in a photo lab. The results from the lab were underwhelming yet…
As I was upgrading to a new router this week, one of the things I immediately wanted to test was the existing ethernet cables and ports. As reliable as they are, cables and ports are also physical objects with lifespans. If cables running behind the walls are damaged, that’s a major headache; and if one…
Upgrading a router every few years takes more than what it should. The price tag on these machines is generally on par with entry-level smartphones, and smartphones with the average upgrade cycle of 4 years have better upgradability and migration softwares. Not to mention, all the manufacturers are eager to support migration away from the…
WiFi is the basic necessity of 21st century. We fight over it, much like cowboys have fought over lands to grow their, well, cows. Wild West is an unusual metaphor for WiFi, but my reasoning is that home networking markets lack transparency and control on how much these home-grown radio wave generators are sold and…
Apple started adopting biometrics in its devices beginning with iPhones, back in 2015. MacBooks released in 2016 were the first Macs that had embedded Touch ID Keyboards, and later an updated wireless keyboard with Touch ID was released in 2021. It’s been 4 years since the first Touch ID keyboard came out; and I’m yet…