Tech πŸ“±

  • Follow-Up (Part 2): I was trying to listen to some Holiday music this morning, only to realize none of my Sonos speakers worked with AirPlay. After digging online, it turns out the only way to get a Sonos speaker back into HomeKit after the home is deleted is to factory reset the Sonos. πŸ˜±πŸ˜…

  • Follow-Up: I think my HomeKit set up is mostly back to normal. I was a little stupid and didn’t take backups / exports…so I lost some historical data (mostly temperature / humidity / air quality) but at least my Holiday automations are working again. πŸŽ„πŸ˜…

  • My HomeKit set up has been rock-solid for years but the minute I added a Matter plug (the “Meross Matter Smart Plug Mini”), everything breaks…and as it’s Apple land, where everything works perfectly until it doesn’t, fixing it is going to be…unpleasant. 😱😭

  • Follow-Up: The IKEA Sonos speaker is working perfectly (which is more than I could ever say of the HomePod Mini stereo set up) this morning; holiday music is flooding the room whilst I’m debugging some legacy Java code. πŸ€“πŸŽ„ (Yes, I had a spare speaker lying around… 🀣) πŸ“·

    Christmas tree with lights and one ornament at the top (a photo frame with no photo for privacy purposes), in front of a record player, with the end of a lamp on the right side of the photo. An IKEA Sonos speaker is on top of the record player, with an 'Ella' record in the middle and a series of objects is on the left side of the record player: three Nintendo amiibo figures (Link, Bowser, and Bokoblin), a Lego penguin, a Jesus stature, and a N64 Lego cube. On top of the cube is a HomePod mini, along with two of the amiibo, and a dried pink rose.
  • Default Apps and Services of 2023

    It seems like a lot of folks have been writing about the default apps / services they use and while I’m late to the game, here is my list…at least for 2023. 🀣 I did a little tweak to the format everyone seems to be using: I split up my home and work life, as I do my best to keep things … read more

  • Moved 18.3 TB of data from my Storage server to my Media server; gotta love the “rsync -va --progress” command! πŸ’»πŸ€“ #HappyGeek

  • I realize I have an old Kindle (it’s the first version of the Paperwhite) but would it really be so hard for Amazon to auto-sync the time on the device like every other network connected device in the modern age? 🀣

  • My various UPS’s (uninterrupted power supply) weren’t cheap, especially the giant one powering my server rack, but every time my street has an outage, I’m very happy I have them. πŸ”‹πŸ”ŒπŸ˜

  • Slowly starting the process of moving my domains away from Google. 🀞🏻

  • ⌚️ Apple Watch Update: After it crashed at breakfast, I just got a “you’re almost out of battery” notification…and it’s only been three hours since I put it on. 🀬πŸͺ« I’m still paying for this piece of junk… πŸ˜±πŸ˜–

  • Another day, another issue with watchOS 10.1 on the Apple Watch Ultra v1. I have never been this disappointed in an Apple product before. ⌚️😱 Two hardware resets and the issues still persist.

  • New Plugin: Simple Image Generation

    So I did a thing: I wrote my first Micro.Blog plugin. πŸ₯³ It’s nothing fancy, just another image generator but, as I was in the process of migrating the content from my old blog to here, I realized I had already created one in my Hugo instance…all I needed to do was port it over to GitHub … read more

  • Migrating from Hugo to Micro.Blog

    I’ve been splitting my time between my own site (pictured below) and my Micro.Blog instance for…a while now. At first, I tried to keep long-form posts on my site (created using Hugo, hosted at Cloud Flare) and micro / random thoughts to Micro.Blog but the other day, I thought it would … read more

  • This has to be the buggiest version of WatchOS I’ve ever used. 😭 Even after an erase / reset, the battery is draining too fast. The heart rate complication doesn’t work anymore. Now I can’t get into the widgets, which means a restart. What is going on at Apple?! 😱

  • Random Thought: Yea, this sounds about right, once the price is outside of what most “normal” people would consider reasonable, piracy increases… πŸ΄β€β˜ οΈ

    Screen grab of a Tweet from Tom Warren, with the following verbiage: if Apple TV, Netflix, and Disney+ keep raising prices then it will only force more people into piracy. It's already surprising how many in the UK use modified Fire TV sticks to access pirated TV shows and movies