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Mouse Madness: Anker 2.4G Wireless Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse Review

 Ergonomic wireless mice! They look funny, but allegedly they help your hand and wrist not hurt so much. I use this wireless mouse for my laptop since about 2021. They don't come in a nice variety of colors and patterns like tiny Logitech mice, but they also don't break when I drop them. My previous ergonomic mouse was a random shape with the company name Jelly Roll slapped on it. Now, the company name it bears is iClever , giving more credence to the theory of the glorified dropshipping warehouse that is Amazon. To its credit, so far, I like it a more than the Anker, at least physically.  They may also be called vertical mice, although they look a bit more like Alienware towers than these.  The Jelly Comb (Right) is a little bigger, with back and forward buttons are placed more naturally for a thumb to click. The clicks are not as loud. Anker is on the left. However, the JellyComb would randomly stop working, despite having batteries and lights indicating all systems go...

Review: Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones WHCH710N

    Having multiple pairs of headphones and earbuds are important to me. I still use my Galaxy Buds on walks or at the gym, but I prefer wired, over ear for at home, and it was time to get a new pair, moving to Sony . These replace my Sennheisers from about 2017 -- While they were uncomfortable for a long period of time, the sound quality was unmatched. I couldn't find a pair that looked comfortable and were hovering around 120$. One of the ear cups has broken off, and I can't super glue and rubber-band it back forever 😥 (Maybe I could use sugru ? It's held up my car windows for 5 years. #NotAnAd)  I had 5 criteria for a new set of wired over the ear headphones; Colorful Wired Reasonable sound quality Under 100$ Made in the past 3 years (No earlier than 2019)   I managed to get 4.5/5 -- The headphones are a nice blue (albeit darker than I'd like -- A lot of my furniture is dark, and I have lost tech for days because my cases are also dark.), they have both wire...

Home of the Zune, Part 1

 Happy new year -- Let's take it back to 2007-2008, and completely ignore the housing crash and economic downturn to talk about Microsoft's semi-failed* mobile media device, the Zune. Mine is the Halo 3 30GB version. I've never played Halo; It was the cheapest one and had a fair amount of storage, so aesthetics be damned. With tactile, round buttons, one within another, it did reasonably simple things like 'host pictures' and 'play music' and even videos.   Source: Halopedia .  I didn't realize there were two different versions, I had the Military Special Edition one! Looking at this picture, I don't remember the Community aspect one bit. I also don't remember the home screen looking like this. I remember The GUI being simple, with the same narrow fonts that zoomed in when selected, but the text was quite a bit larger on my device.Maybe I had changed a setting. This UI is 17(!) years old, and still looks super modern pic.twitter.com/4wCtd49EEp — ...

The Case of Android Auto

Cars have computers now.   Photo by Andrew M on Unsplash  Not mine, mine is about 20 years old. I put a key into the ignition, the CD player keeps eating my alt-pop-rock CDs, it gets me from here to there, and I like it. My next car will be the same, sans CD-eating. But! Other people's cars have computers, and sometimes I have to work on the computer parts.

Neptune by Hashnode

 It's a blogging platform -- As you know (Well, as you know now ), I have been looking for places to export all of this to another platform, one with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and modern editing capabilities that is actually maintained by its owners. Check it out here on Product Hunt . You use Markdown to write; As someone who is used to the highlighter and change stylistic appearances way of things, it's a bit of a change. I'm not sure I've used markdown more than 4 or 5 times in my career -- 8 times in my life. Grammarly is built in; Technically, they're right. Similarly to Notion, we can type "/" for commands to appear. I can't format text the way I like to. The image may not show up on the final product as I used the hyperlink of the image hosted here. Ideally, this text 'new and SEO improved!' would be directly under the image and smaller, as a caption. Notion can do that.  One thing Notion cannot do that Neptune can (or will be abl...

Windows Server Essentials Training Part 5 - Storage Solutions

The course is in 6 sections, so I'll separate them by parts. I do have Windows Server experience, and 2019 is new to me, though the general idea is the same. But first, a short refresher on volumes: Partition table  - Master Boot Record read by BIOS (Old, but still out there. If it works, it works!)  - GUID Partition Table is read by UEFI (New!) Disk Type Basic Disks are divided into partitions (Which you can put different OSes on and boot them - Boot Partitions). Dynamic Disks have volumes (Which can probably do the same thing. These have more flexibility). Has RAID arrays. 📥 File Systems NTFS - Huge maximum volume/file size. Has auditing. FAT - Compatible with everything, but file/volume sizes leave a lot to be desired. ReFS (From Server 2012) - Much the same as NTFS, with less overhead, and find file corruption while remaining online. If you shrink volume size, you're changing the layout to the hard drive. 📥Data Deduplication (Dedup)  - Save space as you store a...

Using AWS Systems Manager and Patch Groups

 This is a way to manage your cloud setup and use patch your AWS infrastructure in a way that meets certain parameters. There are multiple operating systems you can choose from; It's the equivalent of saying "Hey, I have a Linux machine here; So search though all of the Linux options only and see if my particular Instance needs a patch." Or "Here's a group of Windows Servers; Check for patches once a week and let me know." If you have multiple instances with multiple instances, you can put those into Patch Groups and designate a OS to each, however, an instance can only be in one AWS Patch Group (PG) at a time. The most challenging part was simply setting things up. I did this in two accounts: In my root account, with the help of this video on YouTube, I simply put in instances, applied patches easily. In an IAM account, I had to have multiple permissions, and even then it took about 2 days for the instances to be acknowledged and for me to have patches atta...