Remember Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard? It was legendary in retrospect. It was a tenkeyless design with a detached numpad, yet fully functional as a full-sized keyboard. It didn’t need additional software to set up — it was pure plug and play. I had written simple configurations for Sculpt Keyboards before; it was a testament of what…
Storage is at an all-time premium nowadays, with even the price of SSDs and HDDs being affected by AI craze. As much as I would love to say ‘rip the discs raw’, there is bound to be a real world limit on how much storage I can secure for a self-hosted media server. My search…
Just last year, browser extension Honey suffered an infamous scandal. Now owned by PayPal, the extension promised to find the best deal, including finding the best coupon codes. The exposé revealed Honey’s business model focused more on being a man in the middle in both security and transaction. And it also reveals a gap, a…
Bit of context before I get into the whole fiasco. The choke point of physical ownership is real estate. Everyone who has ever tried owning every contents would know this. At some point, medium takes up more space than the media: books, movies, musics, video games, just about all of them. Movies, especially, would hit…
Most of my Raspberry Pis have been decommissioned. I had used Docker and Docker only on Pis, so much of the effort was on focused compatibility and reliability of single machine (Synology NAS) doing all the work. For the record, Synology couldn’t do everything off the shelves. I had to upgrade the RAM from default…
For the life of me, I do not know why YouTube still doesn’t officially support closed captioning on PiP. As much as I appreciate overall better audio qualities even from a beginner YouTuber, the problem stands. Unless I am watching a podcast video uploaded onto YouTube, a video of people talking in perfectly sterilized studio,…
Before some may assume I must be talking of photography in commercial or professional sense, I am not. Just recently, I was searching for a better way to scan my old books, only to find the “real” solution used in archiving was DSLR or Mirrorless cameras on tripods with professional softwares. It is a solution,…
Open source projects always had a huge caveat in its system. If it’s too rigid and far too common, it is less likely to be given enough attention for maintenance until it breaks. If it’s too early in the development and quite niche, it is also less likely to be given enough attention. The projects…
A theory that I had for sometime, originally not for LLMs, but for those who believe LLMs can write perfect codes. LLMs care little about the environment on which the codes will run on. I know the statement alone makes no sense — how can it be considered coding, if it doesn’t work on the…
As I have previously said, I don’t see Claude replacing a proper programmer’s job anytime soon. I am subscribing to meager Pro tier, and that’s nowhere near enough to replace my hobbyist’s job. Granted, there is the joy of not needing to fiddle with technicalities. Being able to implement new algorithm and upgrade existing core…
It’s customary to look for rechargeable batteries for price or for environment or otherwise. My go-to guide on the matter thus far: rechargeable battery is like LED light bulbs of AAs, high upfront but cheaper in the long run. AA or AAA batteries go into remotes are less an issue — they tend to last…
Number one rule of any password is: the weakest link is human. xkcd often puts out great educational comic strips on the subject. One I am thinking of, as no doubt you could have seen in the generator post, is the legendary “correct horse battery staple”, only that he did rigged the game to prove…
Recently, I use my AirPods Pro more frequently than I would have worn my Max. AirPods Max gets a bad rap for its weight, but it’s not the weight that counts. It’s the distribution of those weights; how breathable the materials and overall design is; the clamping force from the form factor (e.g. U-shaped around…
The hallucination in AI, or LLM hallucination, is real. I have read some op-eds and online discussions whether or not hallucinations affect real world use cases — average users making mundane queries. I was on the side of “garbage in, garbage out” camp; hallucination is an expected side effect of the algorithm, and it is…
During my migration from Pi to NAS via all things Docker, one of the problems I immediately faced was how I was going to handle my aging databases. All these eBooks, magazines, articles, and etc. I have accumulated since high school had to go somewhere. I know there would be some people shouting I should…