Time Machine is the reason I recommend macOS for regular users. It’s quick. It’s simple. It’s set and forget. But there also comes a point where your Time Machine destination, be it remote or local, needs pruning. The cleanest solution without additional tools is to create another destination on a regular basis, perhaps with every…
There are a few annotations that only Unix-likes are fixated on, one of which is ^. It means the Control key on the keyboard. Official Mac keyboards often include the annotation right on the keycaps, so it is never difficult to find. However, there are shortcuts that just won’t work even after the deciphering. For…
When I am setting a reminder for an odd time (e.g. Claude usage reset), I must admit, the part that is frustrating is not repeatedly making an entry. Making an entry can be automated with Shortcuts. But marking time in every entry, scrolling through default time selector UI, makes the experience too tedious. So I…
Continuing on from last week’s attempt to make “Get Start of X-Minute” on Shortcuts, instead of making multiple shortcuts, I thought it would be best to make one that can be reused: start of 5-min, 10, 15, 20, 30, just about anything. Download the shortcut through the link. The shortcut takes a dictionary value of…
Shortcuts on iOS and macOS are not the most documented tool to navigate, and one particular thing that catches me off-guard every time is the lack of integration for date and time. For example, when I hit session limits on Claude, I usually set a reminder for when it resets. And it resets usually at…
My old post on wiping retired Synology drives covered most use cases with two big caveats: one, Synology has since introduced full volume encryption on DSM, and two, the FVE implementation on DSM does not guarantee clean disposal. I will get into details in the tangent, but the short version is — DSM does not…
It has been about two weeks since I migrated my primary Apple account over to South Korea. The migration itself was near instantaneous. What caught me completely off guard was Apple Music’s behavior across the different Music apps. On iOS, the app displayed my library (with albums available in the region). On tvOS, I did…
Continuing on from yesterday’s Claude Code piece, Anthropic provides an official extension for VS Code. In it, the command-line flags from yesterday do not parse as expected. Instead, the controls you’d want live in the extension’s own GUI settings page. The settings aren’t in the Claude Code extension’s own interface, but in VS Code’s. Under…
In a more closely controlled environment with less risk, say, in a home lab of an enthusiast, the risk of Claude Code accidentally wiping the drive or destroying another repo is minimal. Not that it cannot happen, but a reasonable amount of backup or git versioning practice could mitigate most of the risks from accidental…
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…