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av: Guide to IEMs, DACs, Preamps and Podcast Studios
Well, thanks to Lucas, I got some great advice about building up another Podcast Studio. I had previously built one at the start of the Pandemic and it has worked great, the core is a Rode NT-1A (which I famously mounted backwards), a Focusrite Scarlett 2×2, but in looking back at great headphones that I’ve…
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scan: new Vuescan Multicrop vs. Cropped Area, Image Type, and Loud Buzzing fixes
I’m not quite sure what I did, but when upgrading from Vuescan 9.8.27 to 9.8.28, my Minolta DiMage 5400 developed some major problems. On initialization, it would just emit a horrible buzzing (as a motor is just flailing away). This is a 20-year-old piece of hardware, so I think I just might have to get…
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mac: MacBook Pro 2014 OLCP Maps, Safari Render Ventura
Well, OLCP has been working remarkably well on all my machines. Since disabling the dGPU on our MacBook Pro 2010, this has worked just great. Even though the fix was for a MBP 2011, this one had the same problem. The MacBook Air 2011 has also been running well if a bit slowly since it…
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scan: Vuescan tips for 35mm negative and 3×5 photos
Well, it’s been literally years since I’ve scanned in photos, but with the move of the MacBook Pro 2014 upstairs, I can begin again. The main issue I’m having right now is that with OpenCore Legacy Patcher on this machine, Sonoma is not working with certain graphical applications like Safari, Authy, and Geotag. Seems like…
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dev: Strange pipenv bugs and dealing with dependabot
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve had my development environment running. It is crazy how things can devolved. To remind everyone, in my normal world, I use asdf, direnv and pipenv (and now poetry and conda) to manage things. The basic idea is that when I switch to a new directory, I get a…
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nas: Moving from Synology to TrueNAS or QuTS and DYI
OK, now that our Synology DS1812+ and DS2413+ are old, we got a new Synology RS2413+, but the DS2413+ is going to go end of life soon. So time to think about how that replacement will go. Make no mistake just like we used the Drobo 2008 and Drobo Pro 2010 until the hardware failed…
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mac: New uses of MBP 2014 for Photos, 2017 for Backups
OK, I did a complete rearrangement of my computing infrastructure (yes it is like I have a pet sheep flock). So here is what we are doing: MacBook Pro 2020 for Video Editing MacBook Pro 2017 for Backup and Backblaze As part of the 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies, 2 local and 1 offsite), I have…
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web: Finding new typefaces and logos
One thing that comes up a lot for me is starting new companies. We normally don’t have a lot of resources, so it is just me sitting starting at a new Google Doc, Google Slide or Hugo website template trying to figure out what fonts and treatments to use. Finding Google Font equivalent to Brandon…
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nas: New Synology tips, use SHR2/RAID6 and move shared folders in Control Panel
OK, I thought that I was nearly done. I had reorganized my machines so that I would have RAID10 partitions for half of each 12-bay Synology RP-2423+ and DS-2413+. But then I started reading and discovered that the new Seagate EXOS drives I’ve been buying at 1^15 unrecoverable bit error (UBE) drives even though they…
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nas: New Synology Volumes, Storage Pools and Shared Folder and WOL tips
OK, I am getting Synology to operate daily. With three NASes, it’s a little complicated and the documentation is there, but hard to read, so let’s go topical and talk about some key tasks. Moving data when Volumes get full OK, I think this is a typical problem, but the main one is how you…
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nas: Latest Synology adding a new RS2423+ and Drive reorg tips
There are a few of these. The big ones have to do with migration because you have to remember a bunch of things. The first is that when you are moving to a new server and want to keep your old one, you have to break all your replications. So the main plan is to:…
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Protected: fam: dct5. Dave Wisdom rules
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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wp: WordPress admin way too hard to find things
Man, this is a good example of what AI is about to do, right now to maintain and edit a WordPress site is just so hard. Every command is somewhere, but it is buried in some place and then another place. So here are notes (for the future AIs of the world to scrape) on…
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tech: More Benchmarking of Disks on Intel Mac
Since I did the whole series of benchmarks on a MacBook Pro 2021, I was curious what the performance is on the MacBook Pro 2017 Intel Mac, so here’s the test series MacBook Pro 2017Razor Thunderbolt DockMBps (R/W) Full Connection Sequential QD32 Rand 4KiBQD32 Onboard 1TB SSD 80% NVMe 2,745/389 441/60 ThunderBay 8 RAID108 x…
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av: Love the old BrainWavz B2, Vsonic VC-1000 and need a headphone amp
Well, as you can tell, I’ve been thinking about audio quite a bit. With the new Podcast studio coming online, I discovered the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is a great XLR to USB ADC, but the headphone amplifier is not that great. I’ll do a separate post on this topic, but it reminded me that I…
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Tech: Grade and label USB cables right now
Man, this is such a complicated topic that I’ve talked about before. But to review, if you are like me, you have a whole box full of cables and they all look more or less the same. Here’s a decoder ring and recommendations for what to do which is basically to make a shoebox and…
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ht: New list of great Bass tracks for Home Theaters
OK, we finally figured out why the subwoofers stopped working. Silly, but after 15 years, apparently a common problem is that the auto-power-on circuit fails. That is what happened with our JL Audio Fathom f112 subwoofers. They are an incredible 1,800 watts of power per subwoofer, so they are pretty mean and have a 3-inch…
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mac: New recos for SATA to USB for SSD on Mac
Well, I ended up with a bunch of different drive technologies here are the results so here are the results using three different SSDs against three different SATA to USB 3.0 adapters. And also my new ZikeDrive Z666. What we want to do is figure out what combination of old drives in the dustbin and…
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home: How to buy Tubular LED bulbs
OK, we had another strange bulb go out. It has a medium E26 base and is about 5 inches long, so how to get a replacement? This led me back to the whole shape vs. base labyrinth that is light bulb sizes, so as a refresher, E26 means an Edison base (which is also called…
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pod: Now building a basic podcast Studio 2024
Well, we’ve had good luck with our entry-level podcast setup and then building an entry-level studio for group conversations. These have worked well, particularly after fixing the various OBS filters. But the main issues with the setup are: So we need another setup that works in a different room since I’m tired of just using…
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web: prevent Read.ai intrusive Zoom lurking now
OK, I try lots of different AI applications and just to warn all of you read.ai is the worst. Basically, once you enable it to use Zoom, even if you disconnect it, it will keep recording and end up as a participant in all your meetings. For some reason, I got a year of free…
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tech: Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are useful
OK, I’ve been using these glasses for a while and I’m surprised at how often I use them. The killer feature is not what you would expect, it is that since it uses bone conduction you can listen to podcasts during any boring meeting. The biggest problem is that we can’t get WhatsApp messages through…
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tech: Qi2 is here! New stands, mats, and travel chargers
Qi2 is here with CES and all those $150 MagSafe 2 charging systems are getting cheaper. It’s pretty clear that Qi2 is going to be way cheaper, so let’s look at ways to put a full Qi2 system for phones, headphones, and watches in every room would You can say that there are two form…
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tech: Apple Home long-term frustrations and vital tricks
I’ve been trying to be all Apple Homekit for the last three years and it has gone so, so. Some things work, but some of the time is how I would summarize it. Still, I miss it when we go to a hotel and I can’t just say, “Siri turn off the lights”. TL;dr Summary…
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Mac: Latest OLCP tricks disable dGPU, searchpartyd spin
We’ve now transitioned four very different machines: MacBook Pro 2017, MacBook Pro 2014, MacBook Air 2012 and Mac mini 2011. TL;dr. Here is the latest update on getting all these old Macs to run, so a summary of the outstanding problems Here are the details on how we fixed the various problems MacBook Pro 2010…
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home: New Guide for Apple Home Smart Humidifiers 2024
There are not many of these actually, I can only find four of them. Of these, the most reasonable seems to be the AirVersa Humidor. I like the look of the SmartMi Rainforest, but it’s hard to justify paying $300 for a humidifier no matter how beautiful. They don’t seem to be on Amazon, but…
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wp: New touches for Menus, Footers and Blogrolls
OK, now that I have some reasonable stability with WordPress, I might as well do the final tweaks to make it work well. It is pretty confusing to change appearance because WordPress has its primitive mechanism, so most theme builders are building on top of that. I’ve been using the SwipeWP and it has some…
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wp: JetPack Connection now fixed by deleting cookies
I figured out what was going on here and the fix because I saw that on my phone there was no connection problem, but not in the web application. The fix is to delete the cookies for wordpress.com and then the connection works. There must be stale data there. One of the strange things by…
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Re: Reblog
Reblog via Drew Harwell Learning how the Friends plugin works. Reblog just takes from my friends feed that are combination of mastodon posts and RSS articles and sticks them on this site. New: Cops are going into pharmacies and walking out with people's most sensitive health information. No warrant or judge review. Comes at a…
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wp: Outstanding WordPress bugs with redis, Disqus, and JetPack
Well things are working pretty well, here are my outstanding bugs: Of these, the Redis one is the most concerning, if it keeps happening, it looks like it is PHP log time.