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…
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’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…
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…
If you are a fan of Shortcuts on either macOS or iOS, no doubt you would have encountered a similar problem as I. In order to load some data on to a custom shortcut, only sensible way would to do so is via a dictionary-type variable. But Shortcuts doesn’t make it easy to enter the…
One of the rather recently added feature on 1Password, which I believe was both an oversight and the inherent flaw of the system, was PIN generation. The password manager was always capable of saving PIN codes, often only 4 digits long. Randomly generating one wasn’t supported until recently. To play devil’s advocate, it is only…
In my previous post, though I didn’t go into any details as to what limitations I’ve faced, I believe I’ve hinted enough that Apple’s Passwords app has missed the mark on the convenience features. One of which was rather shocking; the app doesn’t let a user generate a custom length password. The app is certainly…
I’m not particularly a big fan of having a big system storage. Most of my machines usually have 1 TB or less, and when needed, I use external drives or NAS. If you are interested in playing with Ollama, especially with the new Mac Studio, one of the missing key features of Ollama is to…
This one is a collective study post. As far as I could find, Sony hasn’t released an official documentation on which ports are needed to use PS Remote and PS Portal. Official support documents and manuals for the PS Portal make no mentions of the matter, let alone for the PS5 console networking features. I…
I had a moment of pause while I was trying out Reminders. After using it for a while, Reminders app asked if I wanted to leave a star. A to-do list app from Apple called Reminders is asking if I want to leave a star. If I wanted to leave a review for a third-party…
One of the obvious challenges of using Time Machine is that not all apps and databases are optimized to use automatic backup. Or to be more blunt on the subject, with modern video games ranging roughly up to several hundred gigabytes with day one patches that are equally large, Steam has been enabling developers to…
It’s been about 4 months since I wrote about wp-cron madness. To reiterate why wp-cron had to be called manually, that’s due to how some of the cron jobs weren’t executed even though it was queued for prolonged time. I’ve tried three different methods, one of which was to tackle only the cache. As of…
When I started tweaking the theme for WordPress, I started with css, especially the fonts. I wanted the fonts that mimic paper-like experience as much as possible, and although the goal post has shifted quite a lot since, the way I had done fonts on css were almost always the same. On WordPress, you can…
This one is for documentation purposes. Networking issue is usually the rabbit hole that gets deeper and weirder more we find out. My method of approaching networking is to leave the ones that are currently working, as-is. In other words, don’t jinx it. The problem I encountered was just plain weird. I was spooked by…