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Q: My son and daughter both start cross country practice at their high school this week, and I want a running watch for each of them. Their coach is fine with music during daily distance runs as long as nobody is carrying a phone, so the watch needs to hold music and play it to Bluetooth earbuds on its own. Good battery life and easy charging matter too, because I have no idea how often a teenager…
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026. It is the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model you can pick on Claude Pro. So why does the model picker in your VS Code panel still say Opus 4.8?! Before you go digging through your account or your plan, check the version. Opus 5 requires Claude Code v2.1.219 or later, and the list of models in that picker is compiled into the…
Summary: I generate image-to-video (i2v) clips for a software project on a small consumer level GPU fleet: a flagship RTX 5090 and a cheap, always on RTX 4060. On a controlled raw render test the 5090 is about 5x faster per clip. But in a real overnight run where the two cards carried very different loads, their completion rates were only about 1.6x apart, and the 4060 finished a 74-clip batch in…
Summary: My Remote Desktop session into an old ThinkPad got progressively laggier. Ping said the network was perfect (1ms between host and client with no variation). Performance counters said the server was idle. I was about a day away from buying replacement hardware out of frustration with the lag 😣. The actual cause was a dropdown in the Remote Desktop Connection Experience tab that had the…
Summary: Apple raised prices across almost the whole Mac line on June 25, 2026. The general consensus is that this is due to a RAM shortage, and Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Microsoft all did similar things. A lot of the good sub $1,000 deals are gone for now: the MacBook Air M5 that drifted near $949 earlier this year is $1,299 today, and the MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. It is a rough time to buy…
Summary: Claude Code s desktop app can SSH into a remote machine and run sessions there against your repo, MCP servers, and ~/.claude config. Setup is a four-field dialog, assuming ssh user@host (where user is your username and host is the hostname or IP) already works from your terminal. The non-obvious caveat: session history is siloed. The desktop app, the CLI on the remote, and the VS Code…
Q. I just got an email from distribution@bcbssettlement.com telling me I have a virtual Visa prepaid card waiting from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Subscribers Settlement. Is this real, or is it a phishing scam? A. If is is from that email and matches the info below it is real. These have been going out recently (May 20, 2026) and redemption can be very quick, no issues. Here s how: to check before…
Have you ever been working in a VM, everything s fine, then dialog pops up like this: VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (mks) ISBRendererComm: Lost connection to mksSandbox (3796) After that your VM is crashed and is powered off. Whatever you were in the middle of, gone with it. You start it back up, it runs for a bit, then it might crash again. 😢 Very not cool! This happened to me on a…
TL;DR: There are a few ways to check your ChatGPT Codex usage, including: the web analytics page (covered in yesterday s post) and the Codex CLI s own status line, which can put live 5-hour and weekly percentages right at the bottom of your terminal session. The CLI method is easy to miss if you don t have it enabled, thankfully it is super easy and configurable with the slash command /statusline.…
TL;DR: ChatGPT s Codex has its own usage analytics page at https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/settings/analytics, separate from the main ChatGPT settings. You need to be logged into your ChatGPT account first. The page splits your Codex usage into three meters: a 5-hour rolling limit, a weekly limit, and pay-as-you-go credits. Here is an example screenshot: Where EXACTLY Do I Find My Codex Usage on…
The MacBook Neo is Apple s $599 fanless entry Mac, built around the binned 5-core-GPU variant of the A18 Pro. I covered its CPU, thermal behavior, silicon economics, and 8 GB RAM tradeoff in the main MacBook Neo benchmarks article. This post is the GPU companion to that piece, and it exists for a specific reason. Why this post exists This post puts the MacBook Neo s A18 Pro 5-core GPU against…
Note: this post is published but still in progress. Spot something missing or amiss? Comment at the end 👍. This is a long article. If you just want three paragraphs, this is it: Few laptop families display their lineage as visibly as the ThinkPad. Since IBM introduced the ThinkPad notebook lineup in 1992, the brand has survived more than three decades, a change of corporate ownership, and…
Summary: Codex s new /goal mode lets you hand it a long-running task and walk away. From there it loops plan → act → test → review until your stop condition is met, or your weekly quota taps out. Currently it takes a two-line config edit to enable, then prefix your prompt with /goal. This is very much in line with what the reddit crowd does with a lot of their homebrew scripts and it opens some…
Late 2000. There is a grey and blue tower PC on my dorm-room desk like nothing anybody who walks into the room has ever seen. The Be logo on the front, a 3.5″ floppy peeking out the bottom of the drive bays, and the vertical grille that hides two columns of green LEDs (blinkenlights) dancing with the CPU load. This was a dual-PowerPC workstation running an operating system you didn t see in the…
TL;DR: I went to claude.ai/settings/usage this morning to check my Claude Max (5x) plan limits and got a red error box: Unable to load usage limits. Please try again later. Anthropic s status page banner read All Systems Operational, but Settings Usage was still erroring for me at 7:44 AM Central. The workaround that did work: run /usage inside Claude Code. The session and weekly meters loaded…
A Reddit post called The Mother-In-Law Method is making the rounds in r/ClaudeAI right now. The pitch from u/Ancient_Perception_6: prompt Claude to review your code as if it were written by your mother-in-law, the one who insulted your cooking and your weird-looking feet. Find revenge in the diff. Claude obliged, spawned four parallel hostile reviewers with distinct beats (money math, tenancy, API…
Feel free to comment (at the bottom) if you have any questions! Summary: If you came here looking for the best laptop value for Claude Code in 2026, you can t beat the MacBook Air M5 at $1,199 to $1,255 on Amazon for the 16GB / 512GB model as of July 2026 (the exact price varies with the color selection) it has an extremely fast CPU and all day battery life. Note Apple increased US Mac prices on…
My favorite simple way to cook corn on the cob: simmer shucked ears in water, a cup of milk, and half a stick of butter for 7 to 8 minutes. The kernels come out sweet, rich, and tender. Most people will not need extra butter at the table. Quick recipe facts Serves: 4 to 6 Prep time: 5 minutes Cook time: 8 minutes Total: 13 minutes What you need 6 ears of corn, husked and silks removed (cut in half
Published April 25, 2026. Updated May 8, 2026. Summary: don t overspend, if you are an intermediate to lightly advanced CODEX/ChatGPT user I would start with the MacBook Air M5 for CODEX and ChatGPT, especially at ~$949 on sale See current price. It is silent, the 18-hour battery is real-world good, and Atlas, voice mode, and the desktop app all feel native on it. The $599 Neo surprised me most as…
Update 2026-04-26 Small 4/26 update before you run the commands below: Codex CLI 0.125.0 added GPT-5.5 to codex exec -m gpt-5.5 and the Codex MCP server. (For MCP, restart Claude Code after upgrading so the running server picks up the new binary.) The relay is no longer the only path to 5.5 from your terminal. The OpenAI public API still hasn t shipped 5.5 as of today. I m still keeping the relay…
TL;DR: To remove McAfee WebAdvisor, uninstall WebAdvisor by McAfee from Settings Apps features. You have to SCROLL to find it b/c the Find a setting search does not filter the app list. Click through the we ll miss you retention popup and you re done. I just use Windows Defender as it is much less obtrusive and generally very capable. I booted my Lenovo Legion 7 (16ACHG6) for the first time in a…
TL;DR: Codex sandbox errors on Ubuntu 24.04 almost always trace back to one thing on freshly installed boxes: AppArmor blocking bwrap. A five-line /etc/apparmor.d/bwrap profile fixed it on my system. If you re hitting the same wall, paste your error into Claude Code and let it walk you through. 💪 The Symptom: Codex Sandbox Hangs on Ubuntu 24.04 My Codex setup on a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 VM was…
TL;DR: If you re chasing WD19TBS mouse lag, try the Dell Dock Firmware Update Utility before anything else. My dock was stuttering on every device I plugged in: a Dell laptop, a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, a MacBook, and my Lenovo Legion 7. Running the utility fixed it. The updater showed only one component actually changed: the dock s embedded controller, 01.01.00.14 to 01.01.00.15. The mouse…
TL;DR: This is one real WordPress website maintenance task, run once against each model. On that task, Claude Opus 4.7 produced the stronger first-pass plan because it started from a more accurate baseline. Opus 4.6 was faster and caught one thing 4.7 missed, but it got the active theme wrong and claimed an impossible PHP version. I would not execute either plan as written. Grades below. Note:…
Opus 4.7 launched on April 16, 2026. Here s the fast path to switch Claude Code over, including the gotcha I hit in the VS Code extension. Note Update, July 2026: Anthropic has moved on to Opus 5, which is now the default on Max plans. If you came here trying to get the newest Opus and your picker still shows Opus 4.8, the fix is in my newer guide: how to switch Claude Code to Opus 5. The steps…
If you are getting Rate exceeded. when trying to re-authorize your Claude Code instance, it is probably because Anthropic s servers are having API/login issues: Specifically, if you haven t been heavily using Claude and you get kicked out of Claude Code with reauthorization required for me every time it has been server issues on anthropic side and the eventually resolve. Still, that is small…
Disclosure: I purchased this Chuwi MiniBook X with my own money (~$399 from Amazon). See also: my MacBook Neo review and full Neo benchmark analysis. The $399 Laptop That Refuses to Throttle In my MacBook Neo review, I wrote that after 60 seconds of sustained CPU load, the Neo drops to phone-class performance that a $400 Windows laptop can match. A reader could reasonably wonder: does a $400…
TL;DR: On a Synology NAS, enabling Wake-on-LAN takes two steps in two different DSM screens. Turn on Enable WOL on LAN 1 in Control Panel Hardware Power General, then get the NAS MAC address from Control Panel Info Center Network, not from Network Network Interface. Why Wake-on-LAN for your NAS? Wake-on-LAN, or WoL, lets you wake a powered-down device by sending a small network broadcast called a…
Meta just released Muse Spark, the first model from their new Superintelligence Labs. Along with it came a 20-benchmark comparison chart. The chart highlights every Muse Spark score in blue, which makes it look like Muse is leading across the board. The original Meta release table/graphic just highlighted their column and it made it seem almost as if they won every row They did not win every test…
Who s reading this blog, and what are they running? I pulled month of site visitor stats to find out. The Breakdown Here s the operating system split across all visitors over the last month or so: Operating System Users Share Windows 12,292 53.6% iOS 3,846 16.8% macOS 3,732 16.3% Android 1,919 8.4% Linux 420 1.8% Chrome OS 53 0.2% Other / Unknown 677 2.9% Total: 22,939 users over 90 days. Windows…