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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:…
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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:…