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tech: Time Machine Backups to Synology again and Gregory Alpaca Duffels
Well, since I’m now rebuilding my MacBook 2014 for the third time and the MacBook Pro 2010 for the second, it’s time once again to think about backups. I have not used Time Machine for years because the MacOS has been so stable, but with these old machines and the use of OpenCore Legacy Patcher,…
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tvl: Overseas making and receiving calls like a local
So if you are traveling around the world things have gotten a lot better. Most phone plans have global roaming (the T-Mobile 5GB/month of free international roaming is great). But you still have to be careful about phone calls where they are charging $0.25/minute if you are an international plan. So what do you do…
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edc: Hobonichi Notebooks deep, deep dive
OK, this is only for true nerds, but I was listening to April’s Stationary Cafe podcast and saw on her Penguin Creative and then directly to Hobonichi Notebooks. I had no idea that this was a thing, but the idea of a small A6 notebook that has a day for everything is a great idea.…
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tech: Authy 2FA failed me now onto 1Password and iCloud Keychain
Argh, what a stupid thing I just did! Authy which is now owned by Twilio is discontinuing their desktop versions. That is a real pain for me as I do so much on the Mac. You are supposed to be able to run the iOS application on Apple Silicon but this didn’t work for me.…
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win: Windows 10 update fails and Windows 11 does not see SSD and SSD Shopping
Well, I do have two PCs which I admit I don’t use regularly, but I’ve been pretty lucky with Windows 10 and upgrades. Dave called me because the machine we had built for him (a nice AMD with a fast 1TB SSD) has mysteriously failed Windows 10 updates with long zillion-digit error codes. Then when…
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hw: Awesome Keychron Q2 Max with Gateron Melodic switches and GMK Neon keycaps but you need extras
Well, since I got my first Keychron Q2 Max with the crazy nice linear Alpaca v2 and my first GMK Retro keycap sets, I’ve just been raving about how nice they feel. With the included 2.4GHz transmitter, the connection is rock solid and reliable. Well, I was away for 10 days and just dreaming about…
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mac: OLCP stuck on boot after root patching and MBP 2014
OK, I’ve been using Opencore Legacy Patcher for a few months now and it has been working well, but the big issue has been updating it and rebooting. There is a step called root patching where the boot drive gets kernel extensions in /Library/Extensions and on reboot these can fail. I had in the past…
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sec: Passkeys are everywhere how do I add to 1Password and Apple Keychain
The new passkey thing is pretty confusing, suddenly applications are asking for passkeys, what’s the right way to do this? Here I’m assuming you have two useful tools, 1Password which allows cross-client passkeys, so you do them once and it appears across all your machines. The main ones I’m using them for are Google, GitHub,…
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net: Argh Google Workspace Price increases keep coming
Wow, they’ve been jacking up prices by 20% in their latest round, we started with Business Standard which was $12 and now it is $14.40, so they keep ratcheting the price up. It gives you 2TB/user and Shared Drives and many other things I’ve forgotten (150 vs 100 participants in a video meeting). Personally, for…
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av: MOONDROP littlewhite and Variations do rock
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, I took a trip with the MOONDROP Variations hooked up to the Qudelix 5K, and the auto equalization and other features are great. The only thing that is a little tricky is the I had forgotten how having a cord to a little dongle on the belt can…
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AV: Truly great Qudelix 5K with MOONDROP Variations Auto-eq (and Schitt Magni Soundsource shutoff)
Well on our first flight in months and it was the first time to try the MOONDROP Variations with the highly rated Qudelix 5K and they are a pretty amazing combination. I can see why. First of all , use them with the recommended ear tips not stock, the noise isolation is tremendous. This is…
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tech: Synology NAS performance is 200 MBps and 500/700 IOPS good?
OK, now that we have our disk arrays in order, I was curious to see what performance is like. First some basics, with hard disks, performance is a little hard to understand. The short answer is that two things are going on, The first is, that you have the data under the disk head and…
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Tech: Review list and need for Gateron Melodics
Well, I told you what I bought (Keychron Q2 Max, Alpaca V2, and GMK Muted Retro but not why I bought them). Here are all the reviews stuck on my iPhone fro that: What’s all this about the Hall effect Yes, it’s sort of the latest trend but it lets you measure the exact position…
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tech: Crazy Keyboards Keychron Q2 Max, GMK Retro and Alpaca V2
OK, since my Anne Pro keyboards are all in some sort of Bluetooth hell, I realized that I only have one wireless keyboard, a Keychron K6 with U4T and YMDK Shinethrough Pudding Keys. This has been a great keyboard and I really like the thocky sound somewhere between a click and a silent linear. So…
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mac: More OCLP MacBook 2014 Graphics Issues no All Photos
OK, I’ve already documented a bunch of issues with the graphics support in my slightly strange Crystal Well MacBook Pro 2014 with an Iris Pro and discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M processor, but as we found out the graphics display doesn’t work for things like Safari, Apple Maps and things that I think are using…
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tech: Synology reset, LACP move to ordinary port
If you are unlucky like me and you have 2FA on and then you swap disks, suddenly you are unable to use 2FA. So the solution is to do a Mode 1 reset. That means you find the reset at the back of the NAS and then press it for four seconds, it will beep.…
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tech: Wait for Synology rebuild, SHR2 > RAID6 and Drive Order matters
OK, we finally have things in place and we’ve been copying files from an older SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) system to a newly created SHR2 (this allows two levels of redundancy). The problem is that for the first week, I was only seeing 100MBps transfer rates, but the underlying disks were running at 600MBps. Well,…
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Mac: Anne Pro 2 Bluetooth broken and new Keyboard Guide
Well, I have three of these Anne Pro keyboards and they are inexpensive keyboards with Jade Box White, Gateron Blue, and Gateron Brown keys. I’ve liked how small they are as 60% keyboards, but recently on my M1 Mac, they are having Bluetooth trouble. They are greyed out on the Mac Bluetooth menu which I’ve…
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net: Jumbo frames for all!
OK, as I’ve been moving terabytes of data around with the NAS rearrangement, I remembered that I haven’t optimized the network itself. We have a nice UniFi network switch and the NASes are on either dual 1GBe with LACP or 10GBe. So with these things, one of the things you can do is to move…
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tech: Broken Apple Photos, HomePod Hang, Bash Arrays, Reverse Image Search, Homebridge
Ok, it’s fix things Sunday, so here are the small things that I’ve been trying to fix and their status: Programming Bash Tip While no one in the next decade will ever write a program again, here are some tips if you still are in the last decade 🙂 Bash Associative Arrays. They are a…
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pod: Microphone overload clicks, Magni sudden shutdown
We’ve made about 5 hours of YouTube videos this week and I discovered a few glitches: Overdriving the Scarlett i2I The audio is great except for the last one. I was trying to get the levels louder and instead, I got dropouts and clicks. The Scarlett focus was turned very high to 3 o’clock and…
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pod: rt3. AI Hardware Introduction
This is another sort of nerdy side note. If anyone is still watching, this section is just to give intuition on the basics of the hardware. There are lots of assumptions about GPUs and CPUs that I wanted to make sure people understood. But the basics are that CPUs are tuned for lots of branches…
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pod: dt6 AI Intro and Intuition
OK, we are not experts nor PhDs so most of this is probably not technically correct, but the math is so complicated and the concepts so complicated, that we thought it would be good to just get some intuition on what is happening. So this is a quick talk that summarizes readings from so many…
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pod: New Tips OBS red vs blue, OBS outputs HDR, FCP generates Chapters, YouTube chapter trick
OK, well, the last post about how to get HDR output out of OBS worked! I even finally figured out how to make the objects work in OBS which is not obvious here are the things to know: Dealing with Red and Blue Windows with OBS OK, this is also confusing, but in general, with…
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nas: When your Synology NAS 2FA fails, you are screwed! bag the SSDs
OK, I do the normal thing, I put 2FA on everything, but I have to say there are quite a few dangers here when you are doing it on your home NAS. In short, I have 2FA on all my Synology accounts, but in rebooting a NAS and swapping some drives in, I suddenly got…
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pod: do not forget to use mkv not mp4 in OBS and set for HDR
I thought I was saving a step by having OBS record directly into mp4 but I forgot the reason we use mkv. It’s because if OBS crashes you lose the whole mp4 so do the two steps. Use mkv and then run a remix tool in OBS when done. The reason for this is that…
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pod: Deon and Tong Review AI and Predict 2024
Well, thanks to Paul, Harel, and Julian, we collected a bunch of thoughts on what happened in 2023 and more importantly what folks think might happen in 2024. These thoughts are our own and I’m sure they are wrong, but I thought it might be useful to others to find it interesting. There is a…
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tech: Managing Zoom and Meets Backgrounds
Well, it seems like I still spend an infinite time on Zoom (and Google Meets) calls and I’ve finally found a good system for doing backgrounds. There have been lots of janky things where Zoom doesn’t like videos in a certain format and of course Google Meets doesn’t support videos at all, but with the…
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pod: Finally, a Fix for Apple Compressor waits forever
OK, I’ve been loving the OBS Studio to Final Cut Pro to Compressor to YouTube and Spotify Podcaster workflow. It’s a little janky, but like family, it works 🙂 One annoying problem is that the Apple Compressor will occasionally just stop working. The jobs are stuck. From seven years ago, the fix seems pretty simple:…