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If you run your own DNS server like pihole, you can see in the logs that Netgear routers wants to contact a couple of Netgear servers hundreds of times a day. Netgear has been silent on why they need to do this in public forums. Pihole has a pretty simple way to block this request […]

It is not as simple as just ordering a new plan. While the NBN supplied termination device (NTD) has four data ports, UNI-D 1-4, and theoretically can have four separate ISPs providing simultaneous services, this doesn’t work if one of the services is at gigabit speed, such as a 1000/50 plan. NBN won’t allow you […]

I’ve used quite a few password managers. I was an early adopter of 1Password in 2007 and have been using these managers since then. With version 7 of 1Password, the developers moved to an annual subscription revenue model and the Safari browser extension from version 6 stopped working with Safari version 13 in mid 2019. […]

First there was FTP. Then browser-based services like WeTransfer, and cloud-sync services like Dropbox and OneDrive, and newcomers like Filemail. But now there are services designed for video creators and production houses: MASV aka massive.io Signiant Media Shuttle Aspera Here’s a comparison. https://www.filemail.com/the-ultimate-guide-on-how-to-send-large-videos and another one https://massive.io/how-to-send-large-videos/

I might be late to the game, but just updated a Windows 10 install from MBR to GPT using the “mbr2gpt” command. However, as many have discovered, the convert results in an error message as shown in this video. But, as the video shows, once you reboot the system after changing the bios to UEFI, […]

If you get the error “A revocation check could don’t be performed for the certificate” when trying to use RDP, and you use BitDefender free version on your Window computer  you will need to exclude RDP from Bit Defender to allow it to work properly. More from this tip. Seems this was first discovered and the […]

This blog has entries going back to 2006 and many of the entries did not have a Featured Image set in the post. This meant that the theme didn’t put a nice image in the archive pages. This web page How to automatically set your featured image on WordPress has some useful links and this plugin XO […]

I’ve been using the Widescreen theme from Graph Paper Press for ten years. It was one of the 7 themes that integrated with Photoshelter. However, the theme isn’t “loved” by GPP anymore with a recent chat agent telling me that it will be withdrawn soon. Ten years ago, the iPhone was just getting started and […]

It’s not as glamorous or sexy as wireless, but if you want reliable and fast live transfer of images, this is as good as it gets. Two Nikon D5 cameras shooting football and sending every image live to a cloud service via a shared folder on a M1 Macbook. No external power required. Here’s the […]

Encountered this problem with upgrading from a 3rd gen iPad Pro to a 5th gen. I’d successfully made a backup of the device on a Mac. The iPad uses a separate Apple ID for iCloud and for Media and Purchases. The former is for the shared Apple apps like Contacts, Calendar, Mail etc. And the […]

Bufferbloat is a known problem and can be exacerbated on fast Internet connections like a Gigabit fibre service. One way to reduce bufferbloat and throttling by ISPs is to use a router that has smart queue management algorithms. On a Unifi Dream Machine, this is a setting called Smart Queues and it apparently uses an […]

One of the features of Pihole is its ability to show a query log of which device made a query to a particular domain. This works fine on an IPv4 network. But when IPv6 is enabled, and the Pihole is used for DNS resolution the query logs have entries with unhelpful hostnames. This arises because […]

My network uses a Unifi Dream Machine and implements VLANs. I needed a managed switch for some Ethernet devices and I had a Mikrotik Cloud Router Switch CRS125-24G from a few years ago. Previously I never used it for VLANs, and there’s no guide on how to do this except for a video on YouTube: […]

After reseting an iCloud password, every Apple device that uses the iCloud account will need to authenticate again. For an Apple-centric user, that would be an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Macbook and may be a few other devices. All seemed to go well except the Apple Watch no longer unlocked the Macs. Even unpairing and […]

When you import another catalog into an existing one, or when the preview cache file is not available, Lightroom is unable to show the thumbnails of the photos in the catalog. The catalog will just have grey rectangles like the image on the right when Grid View is selected. This makes it impossible to browse […]

Updated 17 March 2024. The Canon EOS R3, R5 and R6, along with the 1DX, and the newer 5D cameras have a FTP client built in. This allows images to be sent via Wifi or Ethernet to a FTP server. One of the use cases is to send images to a computer. This works very […]

Was tuning my home Wifi and noticed that some of my Apple devices (iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro, iMac Pro) were not getting the same download speeds when testing via Speedtest. On a Mac with two user accounts, one account would consistently get about 10Mbps faster speed than another account. Initially thinking that there might be […]

I’ve just gone through moving a set of WordPress sites that was part of a multisite network on a Digital Ocean droplet. The motivation was having the multisite move off Ubuntu 14 to the more recent version Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS so I could use certbot to install and keep up to date SSL certificates from […]

There’s no clear instruction on how to allow this via the Unifi Controller. On my UDM running 1.5.6.2150 the solution is to Accept ICMPv6 and IPv6-ICMP protocols on the WAN-Local interface of the Firewall. This allows you to get 10/10 from the test site http://test-ipv6.com. If you’re using this test https://ipv6-test.com the results are different on Safari, Chrome […]

Just saw a video on using Fujifilm cameras as a web cam on Apple computers. Basically the steps are: Download and install Camera Live app on Github Download and install CamTwist Studio Run a command on your Mac via Terminal on the app you want to use the camera on Setup your Fujifilm camera Connect […]

Lightroom Classic users know that there are five types of previews. The original four are Minimal, Embedded, Standard and 1:1. Then Smart Previews came along with the cloud based Lightroom. You also probably know that the time it takes to render 1:1 previews takes a lot longer than Standard and Smart versions. But you probably don’t know […]

There are good reasons to have your own private secure DNS server, with the Pi-hole ad-blocker. If you want to setup a private server on your home’s network, you can have a read on why it’s a good idea, and how to do it via https://scotthelme.co.uk/securing-dns…. I didn’t want to have a box running on […]

Since 2013, compatible Macs can be conveniently unlocked with an Apple Watch. However, this feature sometimes suddenly stops working. There are web pages that have solutions, but these are no more than reprinting Apple’s support pages. When my watch stopped unlocking, I was unable to reactivate it. The Mac displayed an error “unable to communicate […]

This should simplify photo backup and quick editing without the need for a laptop when travelling. Just two cables and a lightning to USB3 adapter will allow you to transfer JPEG and RAW to an iPad or iPhone. The 3rd generation iPad Pro uses USB-C connector so a dual ended USB-C cable like this one […]