By Rian

Gray, a writer.

How to Make a macOS Bootable Disk

Part of your “backup plan” for a workstation must include a way to boot from an external source. And this is no different on Mac, regardless of the marketings Apple is selling. Although it is possible to boot a Mac with internet recovery mode, taking bets on at-risk computers are not advisable.

State of eGPU Support on Coming High Sierras

High Sierra tuned in native support for eGPUs, but recent updates on eGPU support on older Macs are looking grim. If you own a Mac that does have a USB-C port, (or any plain MacBooks) it is very likely your computer does not support Thunderbolt 3. Any Mac with Thunderbolt 1 or 2 ports are now less likely to support eGPU even with High Sierra or higher.

Manage the Partition Auto Mounting on macOS

Some partitions on your drive are simply not needed for certain work. While PnP is probably one of the most notable inventions which spread personal computing, it is also unavoidably annoying with possible security risks at the same time.

How to Disable auto-add to Quick Access on Windows 10

Windows 10 finally introduced a sidebar for File Explorer. Windows tend to have quirks that comes and goes in every iteration, and Quick-Access, from the look of it, seems to have decided to stay. But this Quick access comes with a bizarre add-on; it will add –no pun intended– any items you access frequently. Not sure why Microsoft decided to call it “Quick access”, when this is more or less a smart folder.

Install Ubuntu Updates via CLI

GUI in Ubuntu is as much as useless as unreliable. You can never be sure if you have achieved anything on the OS, unless you do it again on Terminal. Most documentations ask you to run scripts and commands on Terminals before you yell at the screen for UX. If your computer happens to be running any Debian derivatives, you would know well what atmosphere I am referring to.

Compress in Tar with XZ algorithm on macOS

“It just works” just doesn’t happen with lossless compression on Mac. Most softwares are completely outdated with insufficient GUI support, and they seem to lack the sense of universality at its core. Users already have universal unarchiver, for the most part free. The real priority, which is to support as many as formats to serve different purposes, is lost to frivolous format warfare.

Duskers Quicksaver

Duskers is a hacker-esque survival game, which dearly reminded me of Cargo, a Swiss sci-fi film from 2009. Now, as a survival game, Duskers is delivered with a weak spot – a saving feature. The beautiful narrative you were developing on your home computer may not be shared by JIL on another computer, closest thing you get as a colleague on board.

Jan 1, 2018

How is everyone enjoying the new year? Hopefully with family with no Dreyfus to talk about. There are several things I need to talk about –which I promise to keep it short– and of the weekly op-ed that was supposed to be published last week.

Blockchain-Based Currency is Not the Money We Know

An introduction to Bitcoin makes it sound so user-friendly and a simpleton business, but elegant with modern encryption, but the actual system design is largely kept a secret like a Death Star. It doesn’t matter how a 100 km-wide space station roams around in space freely and shoot out a laser beam that will utterly destroy 12,500 km-wide planet; what mattered was that it destroys planets and can be stopped by a “one-man starship”. Considering how we even got a good prequel out of that story alone, the story behind Bitcoin also deserves some attention with its ever-increasing exchange rate.

Known Gmail Tricks and Its Usages

Gmail comes with small cheats that other free email services are reluctant to provide. All of these tricks are meant to be used in the situation when you, the gmail user, is a recipient of an email, not vice-versa. Also these are against the standard industry practices, and as such, you should take it with some grains of salt; Google, in theory, could drop support of these features in the future.

Dec 3, 2017

It may comes as a surprise, but WordPress has its own commenting system on the same server, instead of Jetpack, Disqus, or any other comment plugins. And Disqus, to no one’s surprise, almost always wins the nomination for best comment platform.

Dec 2, 2017

As it has been discussed before, the website no longer generates revenue large enough to have multiple authors/staffs involved. But contrary to what I had expected, small ad revenue, enough to pay for maintenance, is still coming in.