While there are good blood pressure monitors with IoT features attached, not all products support Apple HealthKit, let alone have accuracy required to be useful. As some reviews would have put it, smart BPM may not have ‘bang for the buck’, and the convenience offered by the device may not worth the bother if the…
The Mad Tea Party
Inspiring yet Mad Spiels
From How-to
How to Fix Roborock Room Names on Home App
Roborock began to roll out Matter support on its latest models, and with it, HomeKit can now finally see a Roborock branded robot vacuums. So far, my experience with vacuum supports on Matter platform was it cannot completely replace the manufacturer’s official app; however, it is useful enough to automate “stop” or “pause” where it…
How to Change Mail App Badge Counts to All Unread
With the introduction of Mail app categorizations in the iOS 18, Apple is now walking the same path other email services have been on for decades and equally created a gimmick — auto email categorizations. With or without AI, I’ve never seen email categorizations work properly in any context, let alone professional one. Had any…
How to Troubleshoot Steam Synchronization Issues
This isn’t the solution that will fix all synchronizations on Steam platform. Instead, I decided to keep it as a documentation purpose, as most of the posts and articles I could find on the subject hardly touched on it. If you are seeing “Unable to sync” on the Steam client for all games, you are…
How to Scan Documents into PDF on Notes App
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…
How to Batch Incrementally Edit Times on Photos
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…
How To Band-Aid Fix mDNS not Resolving Over VPN
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…
How to Iterate Through Dictionary on iOS Shortcuts
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…
How to Fix iCloud Photos “Unable to Join Shared Library”
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…
How to Upgrade WiFi Router Platform-Agnostically
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…
How to Enter and Manage Dictionary on iOS Shortcuts
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…
How to Generate Random PIN Codes
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…
How to Generate Custom Length Passwords for Apple Passwords App
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…
How to Change Ollama Model Path
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…
How to Port Forward PS Remote and PS Portal
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…














