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wp: Migrating to Cloudways from DigitalOcean
OK, I’ve been managing my WordPress instance on a DigitalOcean droplet for the past four years. It has been faster than my old Bluehost, but costs have been rising, so it is now $25/month up from a much lower number. And I’ve had my share of management issues like installing hand things like redist and…
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tech: Time Machine Backups to Synology again and Gregory Alpaca Duffels
Well, since I’m now rebuilding my MacBook 2014 for the third time and the MacBook Pro 2010 for the second, it’s time once again to think about backups. I have not used Time Machine for years because the MacOS has been so stable, but with these old machines and the use of OpenCore Legacy Patcher,…
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tvl: Overseas making and receiving calls like a local
So if you are traveling around the world things have gotten a lot better. Most phone plans have global roaming (the T-Mobile 5GB/month of free international roaming is great). But you still have to be careful about phone calls where they are charging $0.25/minute if you are an international plan. So what do you do…
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edc: Hobonichi Notebooks deep, deep dive
OK, this is only for true nerds, but I was listening to April’s Stationary Cafe podcast and saw on her Penguin Creative and then directly to Hobonichi Notebooks. I had no idea that this was a thing, but the idea of a small A6 notebook that has a day for everything is a great idea.…
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tech: Authy 2FA failed me now onto 1Password and iCloud Keychain
Argh, what a stupid thing I just did! Authy which is now owned by Twilio is discontinuing their desktop versions. That is a real pain for me as I do so much on the Mac. You are supposed to be able to run the iOS application on Apple Silicon but this didn’t work for me.…
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win: Windows 10 update fails and Windows 11 does not see SSD and SSD Shopping
Well, I do have two PCs which I admit I don’t use regularly, but I’ve been pretty lucky with Windows 10 and upgrades. Dave called me because the machine we had built for him (a nice AMD with a fast 1TB SSD) has mysteriously failed Windows 10 updates with long zillion-digit error codes. Then when…
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hw: Awesome Keychron Q2 Max with Gateron Melodic switches and GMK Neon keycaps but you need extras
Well, since I got my first Keychron Q2 Max with the crazy nice linear Alpaca v2 and my first GMK Retro keycap sets, I’ve just been raving about how nice they feel. With the included 2.4GHz transmitter, the connection is rock solid and reliable. Well, I was away for 10 days and just dreaming about…
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mac: OLCP stuck on boot after root patching and MBP 2014
OK, I’ve been using Opencore Legacy Patcher for a few months now and it has been working well, but the big issue has been updating it and rebooting. There is a step called root patching where the boot drive gets kernel extensions in /Library/Extensions and on reboot these can fail. I had in the past…
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sec: Passkeys are everywhere how do I add to 1Password and Apple Keychain
The new passkey thing is pretty confusing, suddenly applications are asking for passkeys, what’s the right way to do this? Here I’m assuming you have two useful tools, 1Password which allows cross-client passkeys, so you do them once and it appears across all your machines. The main ones I’m using them for are Google, GitHub,…
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net: Argh Google Workspace Price increases keep coming
Wow, they’ve been jacking up prices by 20% in their latest round, we started with Business Standard which was $12 and now it is $14.40, so they keep ratcheting the price up. It gives you 2TB/user and Shared Drives and many other things I’ve forgotten (150 vs 100 participants in a video meeting). Personally, for…