Understanding the accumulation of data
This morning, Belkin announced that they are pulling the plug on their Wemo home automation ecosystem and shutting down the app, cloud, and devices as of January 31, 2026. This is seriously bad news for those of us who bought Wemo smart switches and other devices, since they will cease to function on that date. But there is hope: Most Wemo devices can be connected to Apple's HomeKit before the…
ZeroTier is an incredibly useful tool to enable true access from anywhere to any networked resource. Although TrueNAS has removed ZeroTier support, the FreeBSD package is easy to install and seems to work fine! The only issue is that it doesn't persist across reboots without some major risky work. © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12
Most people know of Speedtest, the online performance testing website, but most nerds reach for iPerf instead. It's a self-hosted, full-featured, open-source network performance testing application that runs on almost everything. Today I realized that there's a free iOS port of the iPerf3 client! It's super useful! © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for…
I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It's a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I'd recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It's still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in…
The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress! © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!
Apple Photos isn't the best application to manage a large digital photo library, but the integration with iCloud, iOS, and macOS is extremely useful. But even though Photos can process and store raw images, it is severely lacking in terms of library managemen. I have developed a workflow to remove raw images from Apple Photos and iCloud and thought I'd share it. Hopefully Apple will do better in…
I recently built the biggest, clunkiest iPad mini case ever, transforming my old Macintosh SE case into an iPad stand. But what to do with that empty case? Why, it's the perfect size for a custom Mini-ITX PC! Introducing my liquid-cooled Core i7 monster Mac SE! © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : My Core i7 Macintosh SE
What happens when you mix two old, broken things together? In the case of my Mac SE and iPad mini, the result was pretty cool! Meet my desktop videoconferencing system! © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : The Biggest, Clunkiest iPad Mini Case Ever: My Old Mac SE!
10 years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, perhaps the most revolutionary technological product in history. There have been many important products introduced before and since, but nothing else was as groundbreaking as the iPhone. Watching the introduction, it's amazing to see just how many things were introduced that day that have become integral to daily life today. © Stephen Foskett…
The new MacBook Pro has USB-C ports for everything - power, I/O, and graphics. And although USB-C ought to support HDMI monitors just fine, I've found that it doesn't work all that well with my 15" MacBook Pro. I recommend sticking with DisplayPort until Apple resolves the issues. © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : Beware! USB-C HDMI Adapters are Flaky with 2016 MacBook Pro