Officially disguised as a Canadian
I purchased a Synology 1813+ in … 2013 (it took me a while to figure out that the last two digits in a Synology model number refers to the year), and in the last week or so I kept getting warnings about imminent failure of at least one hard drive. We’re currently undergoing a smallContinue reading PSA: Check your hard drive health with SMART
Recently I was able to install a new application on macOS that monitors network traffic. Useful for limiting bandwidth usage on the data bundle of your mobile device when travelling, you can limit all or a subset of your apps. It’s neat. A few months ago I was using my mobile data on my laptopContinue reading Surprising data usage in macOS with Apple News+
I wrote three tweets last week which I’d like to summarise here: #BlackLivesMatter #TransRightsAreHumanRights #StayHome The last one — about COVID-19 — is difficult to do if you’re protesting, so stay safe and wear a mask. Remember that the mask must cover both your mouth and your nose. I also wrote on this website aContinue reading Change by a thousand choices
The Twitter account known as SwiftOnSecurity deleted a short thread of tweets today stating that the vast majority of 4K resolution laptop screens could be scaled down to 1080p. This would improve performance owing to the reduction in pixels being refreshed, and those users would scarcely notice the difference. Swift was referring to a display’sContinue reading Enhance
This is mostly for my own sanity, because I keep losing the Parallels KB page link. On a Windows 10 virtual machine running inside Parallels, some random touch pad or mouse movement opens up what is variously called the Task View or Timeline, depending on the version of Windows 10. Either way, it’s annoying andContinue reading Disable Windows 10 task view or timeline on a Parallels virtual machine
Did you know that computer memory used to be stored in cores linked by hand-woven nets of copper wire? The core was a small ferrite ring (iron because magnetic), and wires were woven between them to read or set the electrical current in that magnetic ring (which ran clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on the value).Continue reading Core memory in IBM mainframes from 55 years ago
Tonight on my ESXi host I noticed that I accidentally created a virtual machine with a thick-provisioned disk of 127 GB which was only using 13 GB, so I wanted to free up the 114 GB for other VMs. The following instructions were extremely useful in resolving this problem: Turn off the VM which containsContinue reading Converting a VMware thick-provisioned disk to thin-provisioned
There’s a saying that if something makes you angry you should wait before writing about it. In June 2016, I signed up my company in South Africa with Mailgun, and shortly thereafter connected a subdomain so we could send emails. We didn’t need 10,000 emails. Rather, we send between 50 – 100 a month, evenContinue reading Mailgun is a terrible company and it has nothing to do with their technical ability
One of the best sites on the Internet is also one of the most toxic. No, I’m not talking about Twitter, but Stack Overflow. In previous posts I’ve referenced my own issues with the Stack network, and a few years ago I cancelled my account entirely due to the toxicity of some of its membersContinue reading This made my day
I’ve been following a site called Shady Characters, created by Keith Houston. In his own words, “Shady Characters is all about the stories behind different marks of punctuation”. Recently, Keith went into some detail about the history of Emoji, which I encourage you to check out. The brief history of emoji is far more interestingContinue reading A history of Emoji