My series 4 apple watch was purchased something like 4 years ago, just to help with running. With the release of the new Ultra and the battery on my trusty friend starting to show signs of wear, I was seriously considering an upgrade. That was, until a great deal on a Garmin 6s watch swooped in and I “took a bite”. This post serves as a recount my personal experience with the two, since they are truly different devices.

Continue reading

Long time ago smart homes were hyped and the next generation of home automation. Beyond your analog timers and motion sensors, wouldn’t it be nice to have something a tad more sophisticated to manage all these signals? For the last couple years I’ve been growing my smart devices set and hopping between platforms. This post summarizes the journey, currently at Samsung Aeotec Hub stop. In place of intro… The moment one has an electrical device or switch, 2 maintenance problems arise, somewhat tied to each other:

Continue reading

In this post I go about my journey into VPNs and conclude TailScale is the GOTO for anyone who needs a nice cheap connectivity tool asap. History Sooner or later one needs a VPN. Various reasons: test out UX/behavior from a different part of the world access your test server DMZ, while away from your test server LAN verify prices in other country pay your bills through your bank, while abroad Most people today, though, get it for privacy reasons.

Continue reading

Few things motivate me more, than exciting new hardware and music. My last post has been over a year ago, and that was when Synology released new exciting NAS options. Side-tracking a bit, 920+ turned out to be well worth it’s money: a year later it’s still as performant as day 1, though I did have to disable the RW cache on it :). However today the new M1 Pro Max takes spotlight.

Continue reading

Back in 2013 I got myself a Synology DS413j, which has proven to be a reliable companion for me though these 7 years. I used it for file backup, media streaming and as a TimeMachine destination pretty successfully. Any such station needs good drives to provide value, and drives, as many of us know, are pretty unreliable. In 7 years I replaced about 6: 2 were bad right after arrival, and another 4 went bad as the years went by.

Continue reading

It’s rare that a blog has 0 images. Hosting them on the same box as the blog instance is the easiest solution, but it comes at a cost: disk space and page load speed. Unless you are a professional blogger, you are also not ready shell out many $$ for a CDN, so what options are there?

Continue reading

Two weeks ago my blog was hosted on a 10$/mo vps instance in DigitalOcean, powered by a couple docker containers, running an ever dynamic Wordpress platform. Now it’s completely static, served from GitHub Pages servers free. What follows is a small experience reco/guide on how to make this happen.

Continue reading

In my previous post I was rambling about Seagate BlackArmor and my sad experience with it. Apart from the sadness it also has my initial thoughts and requirements, so I won’t duplicate them in this one. But, to keep consistent with the previous review I’ll go with the same headings/experience areas. That being said – here we go! DSJ413j Half a year has passed and I’ve been using Synology NAS for all this time.

Continue reading

So I decided that I’m sick and tired of plugging in and out usb drives. Be it my tiny 16GB daily thumb drive, or store-it-all 2TB external seagate – this is a pain… And to make sure everything is stored you have to “detach/remove” them safely all the time. And than eventually you need more storage(or will need) and expanding this kind of solution means more devices OR significantly more money.

Continue reading

I’m dealing a lot with javascript nowadays and obviously I have to take performance into account. One way of doing this is writing a bunch of test code and record the time for your scripts, but what if you wanted to quickly test out some approaches and do not really want to invest a lot into them? Today I was pointed to a solution: http://jsperf.com/. This awesome tool does not just give you the framework to easily test out javascript but also provides and already created library of tests other people created when investigating their performance issues.

Continue reading