I'm a fan of home automation but not of proprietary platforms. It seems like every few months we hear about another automation platform shutting down just as a new one pops up. My rule for IoT and Home Automation is that it must be a well-supported platform with good open source support or I'm not interested. So the first thing I did when cracking open a package of smart … [Read more...] about Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
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GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)
On Sunday, April 7, every GPS device on the planet will "roll over" the date. This shouldn't affect most devices, but it's likely that quite a few will no longer show the correct date. We know this because it already happened back in 1999 and similar GPS date issues have been cropping up for the last few years. The good news is that all this trouble will soon be at an end, with … [Read more...] about GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)
The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!
I'm loving the new 2018 iPad Pro. It's amazingly fast, showing off Apple's chops in hardware design like no Macintosh can do. Frankly, it's as important an advance as the iPhone X! Amazing Progress from Apple When the first iPad Pro came out in 2015, I was astonished to see that Apple's in-house A9X CPU had passed the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs in my old Mac Mini and 2007 MacBook … [Read more...] about The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!
Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive
One of my criticisms of ZFS is that it's not flexible: Once you set up a dataset, you're pretty much stuck with it. But this isn't entirely true: You can add a mirror or stripe to an existing pool without destroying the data. Since this is quite a common operation, I decided to write it up for posterity. A Very Simple ZFS Pool Let's say you built the world's most basic ZFS … [Read more...] about Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive
How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud
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 management: Smart folders don't properly recognize them and there's no easy way to remove them from your library so these huge … [Read more...] about How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud