I have a desktop PC and a notebook, both sharing a mechanical RGB keyboard, RGB mouse, and “air mouse” (which I use as a media remote control). This post describes my setup.

When I write, I want proper curly quotes, with the correct opening and closing ‘single’ and “double” quote marks. However, the standard QWERTY keyboard doesn’t have these keys, having only straight 'single' and "double" quotes. Microsoft Office and Apple Pages “Smart Quotes” will automatically fix this, but since I write this blog in Visual Studio Code, here is how I setup my keyboard.

I was looking for “decent” budget computer speakers... I’ll be the first to admit that I know nuts about this topic, but, after some research, I landed up getting the Edifier R1280DBs launched sometime H1 2020. Here are some things I learnt while researching my purchase.

I’ve been meaning to post this from the time I built my Windows desktop. But I keep adding to the list of things I need to configure to get Windows 10 into a ”usable” state for me. Unlike with macOS - for which the default installation is well configured, secure, and pretty much good-to-go - the installation and setup of Windows is extremely painful and a terrible experience. I have to spend hours trying different methods to remove junk, disable telemetry, and secure Windows (and still fail)...

I wanted to turn off my monitor in Windows 10, while listening to music, rather than wait for the Power plan “Turn off the display” timer to kick in. Hmmm, seems Windows has never improved, because I recall having this requirement back-in-the-day - haha, that was during my first project ever, when I was involved in some Win32 development...

I recently wanted to migrate from a Bash 3 shell script to Python 3. This is nothing but a brain dump comparing a few bits and bobs.

Since building my Ryzen-based Windows desktop, I have had a bad case of G.A.S. or Gear Acquisition Syndrome. This time I wanted an adjustable monitor mount to fit my old-fashioned computer table. I couldn’t find well written reviews nor a comparison with a similar model, so here is my opinion of the H80 and F80 monitor mounts / arms by North Bayou.

Here is how I configure Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I do things a bit strangely: by changing the mounts, by running a GUI Desktop, and by running Docker in WSL2 and not on the Host...

Recently a number of emails sent from one of our domains was getting tagged as spam by the receipent. Here are some things I learnt trying to fix this problem...

I have been having issues with my Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro - as the notebook heats up, the LCD display starts to die. Initially the display would glitch - black bars or lines of dead pixels would appear at the bottom of the display,. Then these dead portions start to “jump” causing the display to flicker. The glitches progressively affect a larger and larger portion of display, until the display gives up and just just goes blank! Perhaps the flexgate design flaw with the ribbon cable between the motherboard and display...

When I first used Grav, “a modern open source flat-file CMS,” to host this site, I setup a local development environment using macOS’s built-in Apache and PHP. But this is getting harder with each macOS release, so it’s time to use a Docker container instead.

In the Windows 10 Start Menu, I used Pin To Start to a medium sized tile for Firefox - and the icon is nice and large - but is not the case for other shortcuts. I was wondered why... and how to make all the icons have a more consistent look.

There are multiple ways to run Linux GUI applications in a Docker container, but today I’ll highlight a method that I found interesting: using Xpra to forward X11 screens from containers to a web browser. This post is based on Eugene Yaremenko’s docker-x11-bridge, which I simplified.

I’ve been putting of this post for too long. I use Bulma as the CSS framework for this site. I previously used Bulma Customizer to customize some settings but this does not seem to work anymore. So here is how to customize Bulma CSS yourself.

I wanted to re-purpose an old Linksys WRT54GL by overwriting its firmware with the open source DD-WRT firmware, because the original Linksys firmware does not support a wireless repeater setup. A Wireless Repeater is used to “extend” the range of a primary wireless router by connecting a secondary wireless router (i.e. bridging), and routing Internet-bound traffic via the primary router. Here is how I got it working.

I recently posted about configuring RTSS to overlay CPU and GPU information on games in Windows 10. Here is my setup for Cyberpunk 2077, so that I can keep an eye on my framerates (when testing the plethora of graphics settings), CPU / GPU / RAM utilization and temperatures.

I though I’d quickly post my Cyberpunk 20774 settings running on a Nvidia RTX 2060 at 1080p (920×1080). The default Cyberpunk Ray Tracing Medium preset results in low frame rates and rather blur graphics, although all effects are enabled.

Originally written with v1.04, but updated for version 1.05+

I bought a cheap-ish mechanical keyboard from 1stPlayer, the DK 5.0 Lite 87 along with the DK 3.0 mouse. I called this purchase “a mistake” as I am not quite satisfied with the physical build and the very poorly designed software. So, I figured I might as well do a short review that may help prospective buyers.

I suddenly experienced a strange issue today - the row of number keys on my 1stPlayer DK 5.0 Lite mechanical keyboard, i.e. the keys from 2 to 9, would output the wrong number! Specifically, hitting all numeric keys in order would output 1678923450 instead of 1234567890. This happened while gaming and I have no idea what caused it.

Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.