I currently use two types of Coway products, number of air purifiers and a water purifier. Neither of them particularly need to have IoT features, but recently Coway decided to sprinkle the smarts onto their new products. It does have its advantages. For instance, Coway water purifiers with built-in ice makers traditionally had light sensor to only make ice during day time. With IoT, Coway’s IoCare app can actually trigger when the ice maker function will kick in. There are still buttons on the appliances, so the app is technically secondary.
From Op-ed
Apple Pay Makes Landing in South Korea
I had written the introduction for this op-ed in 2012, and the op-ed was in making since. It began with Apple’s stance on NFC, whether the NFC on smartphones will become the next de facto standard, especially against chip-and-pin and contactless. And not so surprisingly, with Apple Pay introduced only in the United States in 2014, and increasingly more number of countries adopting EMV, the answer was self-evident. Users prefer the convenience and safety of Apple Pay or Google Pay for Android, if not the contactless from their plastic cards.
Goodbye Intel Macs and Mac Pros
Apple is finally shutting down all Intel support for macOS in coming 2026. macOS Tahoe, or 26, will be the last version to support x86 Macs as know it. Given the timing, it means within a year or so, most users would also need to switch over to Apple Silicon unless they have specific reason to stay with an Intel machine that is no longer receiving software updates. It would also mark the end of Hackintosh endeavor as we know it.
Display over USB-C is a Nightmare
Apple had taken a step back its USB-C only doctrine with reverting back to MagSafe for power, 3.5mm headphone jack for audio, HDMI for display, and embedded SD card reader for SD cards. These were the some of the ports and features most professionals wanted out in the field without carrying an additional item. It is more true than ever when Apple Silicon Macs don’t need a charger with its full-day battery life. If so, what became of USB-C? Why so suddenly Macs became divergent on USB-C?
Apple to Streamline Its OS Naming in 2025
It’s that time of the year for Apple’s product announcement: WWDC. We already know the California-based company will announce new OS with some witty jokes, but we’ve already seen two major issues with annual release cycle: one. the supposed major update is no longer significant enough, and two. the aside from macOS, all of the iOS and its variants have inconsistent numberings.
Email Address Is Not Immortal
This is sort of a PSA for all the future developers out there. Developers, do remind yourselves: emails are not permanent. When asking for emails to create a login credential, I suggest you come up with an auxiliary system that allows email address to be changed or updated in the future. And when it is changed, do empty out the place so that another person may create an account with that email address in the future.
Day One Patch Madness on Stellaris
Stellaris is a 4X game started in 2016, and its DLCs are still being released as of 2025. I would argue the game itself is alive and has been successful thus far. But as the title suggests it, the game has gone through several major overhauls during its lifetime and we are going through its third overhaul, version 4.0. Paradox is pushing daily patches to sort things out. As I am writing this, latest version is 4.0.10 as of May 16, and the 4.0 patch was released on 5th with the new expansion.
Cloud Gaming and Remote Gaming
Before I start going through the op-ed, I do need to state there could be some confusions no thanks to mixed use of marketing terminologies. There are two competing, albeit not in the same league to begin with, standards of “remote gaming”, one is from the cloud and the other is from your own device, such as a gaming PC or a stationary console. GeForce NOW is in former category and supports different platforms of clients, meaning the actual computation is done on the cloud; whereas the remote gaming is based on your hardwares, and service providers are simply connecting…
One Display to Rule Them May Be Internal OLED
I thought we were past the era of VHS v.s. Betamax, or Blu-ray v.s. HD-DVD. Turns out, we are having a war of attrition due to neither party has technological nor market supremacy than the other. I’m talking about LCD and OLED, of course. If you were thinking for a moment, ‘hang on, shouldn’t it be the time OLED takes the throne?’, I will explain what led me to write this piece.
Bethesda Region Locks Elder Scrolls IV Remastered in South Korea
Bethesda has successfully launched its remastered classic, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, on 22nd, and with it, South Korean gamers have found out Bethesda has region locked the country out. The only other country that is locked out is currently Russia, possibly due to international sanctions. On Steam, it gets more mysterious as Bethesda has specifically singled out South Korea where the game cannot be activated in, higher level restriction than Russia.
Monitors, OLED, and Future of LCD
Have you checked the price on the computer monitors recently? Mine is slowly burning away from each corner, so I decided good $300 budget would do – how naive summer child I was. The OLED monitors for 27-32 inches are roughly $1k, I get half (technically a quarter) of screen real estate. And while there are competing technologies, namely IPS Black or mini-LED, both of which are still variants of LCDs.
Ethernet, the Physical Champion of Nonphysical Mediums
More than a decade ago, I ran the ethernet ‘backbones’ for my home network: ones to connect the nodes, ones to connect workstations, and ones to connect media streaming devices. If I recall correctly, the fastest WiFi standard available at the time to be used to connect nodes-to-nodes, were either slightly slower or faster than the 1Gbps Cat 5E, which was already wired-in. I benignly thought cables would last long enough with little latencies; how incredibly wrong I was.
Tariffs, Apple Silicon, and The Last Intel Mac
Few weeks ago, I hinted a notion that I was waiting for a possible MacBook Pro update, more powerful chips and OLED displays preferably, and until then my Intel Mac Pro will have to do. Now that America has started worldwide trade war against every nations and unoccupied islands, it peaked my interest how others are adapting to the possible price hike.
On Scanning Old Photos — In Metadata We Believe
I’m still in the process of getting my photos scanned from a lab. It’s a long story; but to put it simply, it appears the lab was geared toward analog hobbyists, not mass album scanning. It would take few more weeks to get it all scanned. As for the restorative works, I don’t plan to do them right away. Few forums and reviews I’ve read on restorations called it more an artwork — each restorer would have his/her technique with different style. But filling in metadata sounded doable. Until I realized how reliant we became on even on the simplest…
Call to Router Manufacturers for Better EOL Disclosure
WiFi is the basic necessity of 21st century. We fight over it, much like cowboys have fought over lands to grow their, well, cows. Wild West is an unusual metaphor for WiFi, but my reasoning is that home networking markets lack transparency and control on how much these home-grown radio wave generators are sold and maintained much in a sense how Wild West was. We are living in a world where having access to the internet is prerequisite for living in a modern society, yet the equipments themselves are often overlooked.