Posted in Products with tags dBrand on November 11, 2024 by itnerd
I’ve recently invested in a dbrand case and screen protector for my iPhone 14 Pro. In case you missed that review, it’s right here. While I was at it, I figured that I would update the protection for my AirPods Pro. Thus I decided to also grab the dbrand Grip Case for AirPods Pro. Here’s the box that it comes in.
Inside the box you get the case, And below it a SIM ejector tool that you can use to thread the lanyard that comes with the case through the case, a black triangle that is meant to help you to remove the case, and to the right a skin for the case and an extra set of stickers for the top part of the case.
Installation was easy enough. But just in case, dbrand have provided this video to help you with that. And that installation took less than five minutes. The net result was this:
The carbon fibre is on brand for me and fits with the Grip Case for my iPhone 14. The lanyard is a nice touch as well. The bottom portion of the case fits really tight. So including a tool to help you to remove it makes sense. But the real star of the show is the fact that the case has a texture that borders on sandpaper along with what dbrand calls grip strips to ensure that your hand. The button is pretty click and the light on the front is clearly visible. No complaints from a fit and finish perspective. The company also promises “military grade drop protection”. But they don’t say what that means specifically. I’ll also note that wireless charging works. But I don’t have the ability to stick the AirPods Pro case to a MagSafe adapter as the magnets in the AirPods Pro case don’t have as much sticking power as it did when it didn’t have a case. Having said that, the case doesn’t really add that much thickness to the overall package.
The only downside that this case is the price. It’s $34.90 USD. You can find AirPods Pro cases on Amazon for less money. So you have to decide if going the dbrand route to protect your AirPods Pro is worth it for you. It is for me as it makes my everyday carry a bit more cohesive. Which is why I’ll be rolling with this case until I need to replace my AirPods Pro. Which hopefully won’t be anytime soon.
Posted in Products with tags dBrand on November 8, 2024 by itnerd
Given dbrand’s recent issues with racism, I wasn’t going to do business with them again. But I needed a new case for my iPhone 14 Pro which just had its battery replaced under AppleCare. You see I don’t find the iPhone 16 series a compelling upgrade. And the case that I have been using since I got the iPhone is on its last legs. Likely because it is being used pretty hard for anything like my daily activities, to being in the back of my cycling jersey, to cross country skiing. Seeing as this phone has to last me one more year, I thought about it and decided to give dbrand another chance by ordering their Grip Case. And while I was at it, I also decided to get their Prism 2.0 screen protector as the one on my iPhone has been there since the day I got it.
Let’s start with the Prism 2.0 screen protector. This is billed as an “idiot proof” screen protector. Now I was skeptical of this as if you make something idiot proof, God or whatever deity you worship will build a better idiot. But I think that maybe dbrand is on to something. And it starts with the packaging.
The screen protector comes in a box that feels like it’s oozing quality. Open it up and you get this:
In the middle, you get the screen protector and some documentation along with the cleaning kit which is under the scree protector. dbrand has also made accommodations for all types of users. For those who can read instructions, you’re covered on the left side of the box. But on the right side there’s a QR code that takes you to an installation video. Handy for those who live in places like Florida and Texas where they ban books and by extension don’t want you to read things.
Now I could describe how insanely easy it is to install this screen protector, but I’ll use the video that is aimed at those who can’t read instructions.
Now I have installed lots of screen protectors in my time. This by far was the easiest that I have ever installed. There were no bubbles or dust or smudges after installation. The Prism 2.0 features premium tempered glass which dbrand claims hits a 7 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. I didn’t test that. Thus I will take their word for it. I also note that the coverage of the screen protector looks like it hits the limit of what the size of a screen protector can be on a phone without interfering with a case. I did try the dbrand case and a case from another brand to see if the case interfered with the screen protector and found no issues. You get two of these screen protectors for a rather pricey $34.95 USD.
Now let’s move on to the Grip case. You can buy the case for $59.90 USD and add a skin to it so that it stands out. In my case, I did order a carbon fibre skin as if you’ve seen my most recent Everyday Carry article, is on brand for me. The case is MagSafe compatible which means that it will work with MagSafe devices, but when you put it on your phone it won’t do the MagSafe animation. That I suspect is a non-issue for most. The magnets felt decently strong without the skin on it. But they felt a bit weaker with the skin on it.
Putting on the skin is easy if you watch this video first. I didn’t so I sort of YOLO’ed it. But I have installed enough dbrand products over the years that I know how to do it without screwing up.
Here’s the result:
The case adds minimal bulk to the phone. It’s really thin and it is grippy as dbrand says it is. Here’s why:
The case is textured and has an almost but not quite sandpaper feel to it. Plus the shiny bits are additional “grip strips” as dbrand calls them. Seeing I suffer from “butterfingers”, this case might help with that. Speaking of drops, dbrand claims that this case has “military grade” drop protection. But they never say what that actually means. And for the record, I have not dropped my phone since getting this case. Which implies that the grippy part of this case works as advertised. I should also mention that the buttons on the case have a very tactile feel to them.
There’s as lip around the back of the case that not only protects the camera lenses, but it allows the phone to lie flat on a table. That’s brilliant. And you can see that I applied the carbon fibre skin not only on the case, but around the camera lenses as well. And the carbon fibre feels really nice in the hand. It actually feels like carbon fibre.
One thing that you can’t see from these images is the fact that this case comes with chamfered edges which is along the case’s front lip. That gives you full access to the top and bottom of your screen. And the sides are a bit lower in the middle than on the edge. All of this allows you to navigate your phone a bit easier.
I should note that the inside of the case is lined with microfibre. That’s something should help to make sure that your case doesn’t scratch your phone. The fit of the case is tight which means that it’s more likely to be able to better protect your phone should you drop it.
The only downside to this case is that it collets lint like a lint roller. Well maybe not that bad. But it’s not uncommon for me to pull my phone out of my pocket and have lint all around the edges. If that’s something that you think might bother you, you might want to look elsewhere for your phone case needs. Plus it is a pricey case. That will turn some people off for sure.
Hopefully this combo will keep my phone protected for another year until hopefully a compelling iPhone comes out that will entice me to upgrade. Do I recommend the dbrand Prism 2.0 and Grip Case? Well, in the few days that I had them, they seem like they deliver on what the company promises. We’ll see long term if that changes. But in the here and now, both products seem like winners to me.
Posted in Products with tags TP-Link on November 6, 2024 by itnerd
When I signed up for Distributel, one of the things that I was offered was what they described to me as a “WiFi pod”. I only took one as I had zero intention of using the gear that an ISP provides as that’s a form of lock in by said ISP. But what I got was a pre-configured TP-Link Deco X50 WiFi router/Access point as opposed to something unique and custom made for the ISP. That piqued my interest.
The Deco X50 is a WiFi 6 dual band router that when you have two or more of these can also deliver mesh WiFi. Let’s have a look at it:
From the front, it’s rather unremarkable. Which is good as it will fit into any decor.
From the back you get three gigabit ethernet ports. Any port can be used to connect to your ISP. But because they are all gigabit, you’re limited to gigabit speeds. Which makes the X50 not the correct choice if you have faster than gigabit service.
Now each X50 unit has only two radios. A 2.4GHz one and a 5GHz transmitter that handles both client connections and backhaul traffic. Having a third radio for backhaul traffic would be better for a lot of people who have a lot of devices in a mesh setup as that will create some amount of congestion between each unit if the traffic between the two is high enough. But only having two radios keeps the price down which I suspect was the priority here.
Power users will be disappointed with the fact that there’s no web page with advanced configuration options as everything is done through the Deco app, although there is a web based status page. To be fair you can configure a number of things via the app form the initial setup, which by the way is easy enough for the average person to do, to some more complex tasks as turning on QoS or using their parental controls subscription service. In terms of the parental controls service, the fact that parental controls are a subscription service that you have to pay for is a bit of #fail as competitors ASUS offer that for free.
Now in my testing, performance was actually decent. Let’s start with the performance from the Optical Networking Terminal that Distributel supplied to the X50:
Now I had to test this via plugging in an Ethernet cable to my MacBook Pro because I couldn’t find a speed test built into the router or the Deco app. But this result is better, especially on the upload end of things than my ASUS Zen WiFi XT8 which isn’t that good when it comes to upload in PPPoE scenarios. Further validating that I need to dump the ASUS gear for something better as I am clearly leaving some speed on the table by using the ASUS hardware.
From a WiFi perspective, the performance was also decent. This result was from about 5 feet from the X50:
That’s competitive with the XT8 which also supports WiFi 6. So from a performance perspective, it doesn’t suck. Though I do wonder how it would perform with multiple units and a lot of traffic given that there’s no dedicated backhaul.
So would I recommend the X50? It depends on the type of user your are. If your needs are modest. As in you need WiFi 6 in your home and you’re not doing anything crazy, this might be an option for you. If you’re a power user or you have faster than gigabit internet, you should likely look elsewhere. At least the price is better than decent as I found a pair of these for $179 CAD on Amazon. Thus if you fit the use case for this WiFi router/access point, it’s worth looking at in my opinion.
I’ve been working on upgrading my desk setup and I’ll be doing a story on that shortly. But in the meantime, I’ve been looking for a way to better use the Apple Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad that I’ve recently acquired. The main issue that I’ve had is that one or the other would move. Thus I couldn’t use muscle memory to control and type on my Mac. Thus figuring that I wasn’t the only person with this issue, I did some hunting around and came across the Twelve South Magic Bridge Extended.
The MagicBridge Extended is a plastic tray that fits the MagicKeyboard that I have along with the Magic Trackpad. The grey section is where the keyboard goes if you’re right handed. Or you can move it to the left to set it up the other way around.
The bottom has holes that allow you to push out the keyboard and trackpad should you need to.
This is the end result with the keyboard on the left, and my Snapping everything in is simple because TwelveSouth put out this video that shows you how to set things up:
I had no issues setting things up after I watched this video and it only took a couple of minutes.
The back of the MagicBridge Extended has holes that not only allow Bluetooth signals through, but also give you access to the on/off switch as well as the Lightning port for charging.
So I have used this setup for a couple of days. And once I found a position where I could type and use the Magic Trackpad without it feeling weird, I found that it worked quite well. By “weird” I mean that you have centre the keyboard part of this setup so that typing feels normal. That puts the trackpad out to the right in my case as I am right handed. I can see how that might be an issue for some. And for those who have a bit of OCD about centring everything on your desk, that might be a bit of an issue too. Since the keyboard and trackpad are one piece, I can use it on my lap if I so choose. It also allows me to move the keyboard and trackpad out of the way quickly if I need the surface of the desk for something else. But the main goal was to keep the keyboard and the trackpad in a consistent place where muscle memory would allow me to be productive as nothing was moving about. And it succeeds on that front. Overall, I like the setup.
The MagicBridge Extended is $50 USD directly from Twelve South. But if you have the Magic Keyboard without the number pad, they have a version for that use case as well which is simply called the MagicBridge. If you own a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad and you want to make them even more useful, The MagicBridge Extended or MagicBridge is absolutely worth looking at.
Posted in Products with tags OWC on September 30, 2024 by itnerd
When my MacBook Pro is set up at my desk, I use a dock to create a “1 cable solution” to charge and provide extra ports like USB ports and card reader ports. I do that because it’s a lot easier to access the dock’s ports rather than the ones on the MacBook Pro. And a dock often adds additional ports that I didn’t have before. With that background out of the way, I was intrigued by the OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock that OWC sent over for me to review. And after using it for the last few days, I can conclude that it is a dock that you should go out and buy if you want a dock that provides a load of functionality.
Let’s look at the dock:
The dock is 1.4″ x 9.5″ x 3.6″ and has some heft to it. But not so much heft that it would deter you from tossing it into a backpack to take it someplace. It’s made of aluminum which when in use gets warm to the touch. I point that out because I’ve tried docks that get outright hot to the touch which doesn’t exactly give me a good feeling as I wonder if the dock in question will die at some point because of the heat, or if it will have some other issue that would be a problem. I don’t have that feeling with this dock as clearly the heat is being managed well given that it is warm and not hot.
On one side you get a Thunderbolt 4 port that does 90W power delivery. You also get a Kensington slot to make sure that the dock doesn’t grow legs and walk away. This is the Thunderbolt 4 port that you use to connect to your laptop. In my case an M1 MacBook Pro. 90W of power delivery is a win because any laptop that requires a lot of power is going to be able to be charged quickly with this dock. Now if you look just above the Thunderbolt 4 port, there’s a hole there. That’s actually for a cable stabilizer that you can buy separately that makes sure that the Thunderbolt 4 port doesn’t disconnect by accident.
On the back you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports that do 15W of power delivery, a HDMI port with the ability to drive an 8K display at 60Hz, a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port which is handy if you have a network that supports that speed. Two USB-A 3.2 10 Gb/s ports that do 1.5A of power for bus-powered drives and device charging, and a plug for a power cable. Here’s why that power plug is cool. The power adapter that’s built into the dock. And that means no ugly power brick to deal with. It also means that you can use this dock worldwide. As in it covers 100~240V. And the plug itself is a 2 prong power cable. That’s important because if I want to travel with this dock, I simply have to figure out what cable I need for the country that I am going to and buy it off Amazon as a 2 prong power cable is very common and easy to find. Above each Thunderbolt 4 port are cable stabilizer ports.
On the front you get an UHS-II SD card slot, a 1/8″ audio jack (it’s a combo port by the way), a USB 2.0 port and a USB-C 3.2 10Gb/s port. The other thing that I note is that there’s a fair amount of ventilation on this dock. Clearly that helps in terms of keeping it cool. Above the USB-C port is another cable stabilizer port.
I am going to flip over the dock to point out two things that I thought were cool. The first is that there are lights that tell you what’s going on from a power and Thunderbolt perspective are on the bottom. Because they’re on the bottom, it means that they will not light up a dark room. But will still be noticeable if you’re looking for them. People who work in dark rooms who don’t want the LED’s from their devices glowing all the time and bothering them rejoice!
To encourage you to RTFM, OWC has a sticker with a QR code that takes you to online versions of the manuals for the dock and a piece of software called Dock Ejector. More on the latter in a moment.
Also included in the box is a power cable and a Thunderbolt 4 cable. Both should be long enough for any use case that you might have. I should also note that the Thunderbolt 4 cable is a high quality cable that I would expect to last a long time.
So right off the bat, there’s a lot of good things here. Starting with the fact that it does 90W of power delivery to your laptop which means that you won’t be waiting for it to charge. And you have more than a healthy selection of ports to cover pretty much any use case. In terms of speed, from my testing you seem only to be limited to the speed of the devices that you connect to this dock to a point. For example, I connected an OWC Envoy SSD to do some testing with it and this is what I got:
If you compare these results to what I got when I reviewed it, having the OWC Envoy SSD connected to this dock results in roughly a 10% speed hit versus connecting it directly to my Mac. So while there is a a bit of a speed penalty, it’s a minor penalty that I am not going to lose any sleep over as you likely won’t notice it or care over the long term as this is still plenty fast.
OWC has a unique use case for this dock that allows you to use the Apple SuperDrive USB-A CD/DVD burner with this dock. Typically, docks don’t play nice with the Apple SuperDrive because of the power that they require. That usually means that you have to connect them directly to a Mac and that defeats the purpose of having a dock. To exploit this use case, you need to install a piece of software from OWC called OWC Dock Ejector. That does two things, it installs a driver that allows the SuperDive to run with this dock and consume more power, and it gives you a menu bar icon that allows you to eject discs easily. But to use this software, you need to change security modes on your Mac as per this YouTube video.
Now after watching this video, some of you might have an issue with this as lowering the security of anything is bad in 2024. So let’s go into the weeds for a bit to illustrate why this isn’t an issue.
Macs can have three possible security polices to choose from:
Full Security: This is the default and safest boot policy, with no security downgrades permitted. Your Mac ensures that only actively signed versions of macOS can be installed. (Fun fact: On iOS, this is used to prevent downgrades to previous versions.)
Reduced Security: Any compatible macOS version can be installed, as long as it was previously signed by Apple. You can also permit the following:
Allow third-party kernel extensions to run
Allow MDM (Mobile Device Management) to manage kernel extensions and software updates
Permissive Security: This is the most dangerous level and is hidden for safety reasons. Any compatible operating system can be installed, such as custom macOS builds or Linux. You can also permit the following:
Allow third-party kernel extensions to run
Allow MDM (Mobile Device Management) to manage kernel extensions and software updates
If you really want to go into the weeds on this, Apple has this document for Apple Silicon Macs, and this document for Intel Macs that can help you with that. But here’s where I’m going with this. Reduced Security which is what OWC needs you to set your Mac to in order to install Dock Ejector, or more specifically the driver that allows the SuperDrive to work with your Mac via the dock. And using Reduced Security could introduce a theoretical risk that you could get pwned by something because the security level is reduced from the default level that your Mac ships with. But the reality is that the chances of getting pwned in while you’re in this mode are somewhere between slim and none. I should also note that OWC’s driver is notarized by Apple. So it’s not some sort or rogue piece of software. And all of that is on top of the fact that anything else that runs in that mode has to be notarized by Apple. That in effect means that no rogue piece of code should be able to pwn your Mac.
Now having said all of that, I am going to go out on a limb and say that a few of you will still have a problem with this. Let me help you with that. I was able to hop onto a Zoom call with OWC and they explained two things to me:
The current driver that is part of Dock Ejector was was written in IOKit . Long story short, as macOS security tightened up around the kernel with every iteration of macOS, it forced OWC into a position where they had to ask users to do what I described above because this driver is a kernel driver which lives in layman’s terms in the core of the operating system.
There is an upcoming version of Dock Ejector that should ship by the end of the year that includes a driver that has been rewritten in DriverKit. By using DriverKit, the driver runs not in the kernel, but in the user space. Which means that you don’t have to do what I described above to install it. Or put another way, you can use this new version of Dock Ejector to get your SuperDrive working without having to do anything that affects what I will call your “perceived level of security”. That’s a total win as far as I am concerned.
Let me point out one more thing. What the above illustrates is that OWC is a top shelf company to deal with. I highlighted a concern to OWC about something that their product did. They hopped onto a Zoom call with me and gave me their side of the story. They were completely transparent and open and I walked away with the feeling that I could confidently recommend this dock to those who find this to be a non-issue, and to those who might have a concern as that concern has been fully addressed from where I sit. I’m pointing this out because I rarely get this level of response and transparency from a company whose products that I review. And I am someone who among other things reviews products for a living. So you would think that because of that, companies would want to talk to me. But that’s not the case. I’ve had situations where companies have blown me off in similar situations. OWC didn’t do that which suggests to me that if you buy one of these docks, which you should if you have a use case that this dock can address, you’re going to be taken care of over the long term.
Now with that out of the way, Dock Ejector has a handy feature where if you try to eject a volume that has a file open by an application for example, it will not only tell you that is the case, but it will tell you what application is keeping it open. Thus allowing you to take action as you will be presented with the option to force eject the volume. That’s very cool. And makes it totally worth running if you have this dock.
I will end this review by saying that I really like this dock and I highly recommend it. During my week of testing it, I found zero issues with it and it is solid. Not to mention that it is well designed and thought out to make sure that it appeals to the broadest set of users possible. And at a cost of $299.99 USD, this dock is an excellent value given what OWC has brought to the table feature wise. And if that Dock Ejector thing bothers you, when the new version ships I’ll update this review with a download link to that new version in order to address your unease. If you need a dock for your desk setup, there’s really no reason why the OWC Thunderbolt Go shouldn’t be your first choice.
UPDATE: Dock Ejector 2.0 has launched. More details here.
Posted in Products with tags Apple on September 26, 2024 by itnerd
Since moving my desk setup to having my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode, I’ve missed having a trackpad. The reason being that Apple’s trackpads support gestures that can make doing a lot of things way faster than using a mouse. So after months of stalling, I finally bit the bullet and handed over $169 CDN to Apple to get this:
Meet the Apple Magic Trackpad. It supports both Force Touch which is the ability for the touchpad to react to how hard you press it. That’s handy for apps that actually support this feature. It also has zero moving parts like the touchpads on Apple’s MacBooks. Thus everything you feel is simulated via Apple’s haptic feedback tech. So if you’re used to that, you’ll feel right at home. Finally, it supports multi touch gestures. More on that in a bit. It’s available in white or in the black that you see here. I don’t know about the white version of this, but the black version attracts fingerprints like crazy.
On the back is an on/off switch, as well as a Lightning port for recharging the trackpad seeing as it’s wireless. Much like the Magic Keyboard, I have to ask why do we not have USB-C on this in 2024? I guess that the EU needs to force Apple to get with the times as this is just dumb. For what it’s worth, the battery inside the trackpad lasts just over a month, and it comes with one of these:
It’s a USB-C to Lightning cable that is pretty good quality.
Back to why I got this for myself. Over the years I have come to rely on the multi touch gestures that Apple has offered in their notebooks to navigate and do things in macOS. If you’re interested in learning what these gestures are, this can help you. And that fact that this trackpad supports them immediately makes me way more productive at my desk. For example I often use apps in full screen and swipe between them using the trackpad. And doing that takes far less effort with the trackpad than it does with a mouse. Having said that this trackpad will not completely replace a mouse as it is simply not as accurate as a mouse. Thus I always have a mouse on standby should I need to do something that requires some level of accuracy. Color correcting a photo would be an example of that.
Here’s one thing that makes this trackpad worth considering. Unlike the Magic Mouse which for reasons only Apple understands requires you to flip the over to charge it, rendering it useless in the process, you can use the trackpad while you charge it. It makes me think that these two devices were designed by two groups of people who clearly didn’t talk to each other.
So would I recommend the Apple Magic Trackpad? If you want to accelerate your workflow and don’t mind spending spending some time to learn the multi touch gestures, then yes. If you’re used to how your MacBook behaves and you want to replicate that on your desktop, then yes for that as well. Just don’t throw away your mouse as that will come in handy from time to time.
Oh, I have a message for Apple. You need to move these accessories to USB-C. It’s 2024 and you really have no excuse anymore.
Posted in Products with tags Bakespace on September 25, 2024 by itnerd
By Ms. IT Nerd
Besides her many other talents, my wife when she isn’t working during the day is a trained baker having studied at George Brown College’s Hospitality and Culinary Arts school. Her cakes and other baked goods are sought after for parties and other events. Thus this makes her the perfect person to do this review.
When BakeSpace reached out to Mr. IT Nerd, I was excited. This dropped into my lap a timely way as I was involved in baking up a cake for my girlfriend’s milestone birthday for her party. This cake needed to feed 40 – 44 people and I needed help. On the suggestion of our planning group chat in Signal, the idea was born where the cake was to be a certain part of the male anatomy. This was uncharted territory for me but I had ideas and a rough plan of attack. Enter Bakebot AI. Let me demonstrate this via a video before I go into detail:
Here’s the interaction that I had with Bakebot AI:
Bakebot AI question: “What cake pans should I use to make a penis cake to serve 45 people?” I had the Home Cook option turned on as I needed Bakebot AI to provide options that I can use at home cook and it delivered suggesting 9 inch round pans and 9 x 13 inch rectangular pan which would be most commonly used by home cooks.
Out of curiosity I tried the ProChef and Adventurous setting almost expecting the same answer to the same question and I was pleasantly surprised when it gave me a different answer each time and all of the options suggested would work. You can also re-frame the question and ask “how can I make a penis cake using only 9 inch round pans and 9 x 13 inch rectangular pans”. In fact I was having so much fun conversing with Bakebot AI that it was getting a bit addictive for the baking nerd in me.
My next hurdle was getting the right colour(s) for my project. I asked BakeBot “what Chef Master colours should I use to mix skin tone?” It provided me with the suggestion of Chef Master Soft Pink (#101), Egg Yellow (#112), Master Brown (#124), Master Red (#107) along with colour mixing suggestions. It will do the same for AmeriColour. I then tried to challenge it by asking for suggestions for a Toronto food colour brand McCall’s. This is where it provided more general colour vs the specific version of the product. But it had exceeded my exceptions.
I found that I liked using the free BakeBot version as it was very intuitive for me to just click on the BakeBot AI beacon and ask all my questions and it would provide you with the advice that I mentioned above. As a member to utilize the BakeBot AI functionality you would need to go to BakeBot AI Recipe Maker and provide you with a recipe then you see below. Personally I liked the BakeBot AI beacon/icon and think that in the member section they can add “Save Recipe to BakeSpace” as an option that would work better rather than having change the experience.
As for the rest of the experience, My Cookbooks is the section where you can create, share and sell your cookbook.
Pro – The creators of BakeSpace thought about you and your privacy in many ways here as you can see in the Privacy Level. You can keep your Grandma’s recipe in the family by setting it as Group Cookbook or you can share it with the world for free or charge a fee. Most of the cookbooks for sale seemed to be published by Bloggers, Pros or the Community usually for a nominal price. The only con that I can think of is that I have a cooking app paid subscription or using recipes from website or my hardcopy cookbooks and BakeSpace is all about Community for Community and does not allow proprietary or paid subscriptions to be integrated.
Pantry Magic – I entered all the ingredients that I use for make my easy comfort food Asian fruit salad and it gave me this recipe with fresh herbs, honey, walnuts, lemon juice to provide texture and some freshness which is definitely a practical way to go. But you can try it this pantry staple salad using the Asian Kewpie Mayonnaise (a Japanese mayo that gives that umami flavour) and you will change BakeSpace get the Asian pantry fruit salad that you may like. For anyone reading this article I am sharing this recipe with you as I have saved the recipe and called it Asian Fruit Salad. Unfortunately I was not able to remove the section “Pairs Well With” with default “This delightful salad pairs well with Sauvignon blanc and non-alcoholic iced green tea” so I modified it to say “This delightful salad pairs wonderfully with any non-alcoholic iced green tea or drink.” as I feel there is no place for alcoholic drink with a fruit salad unless you are one of these people who feel it’s 5 pm somewhere.
Recipes – is where you can access all of the recipes created by BakeBot AI or shared by the BakeBot community.
Overall I feel that BakeSpace exemplifies the best of a sharing community where the love of baking can be shared. My favorite aspect is the BakeBot AI who hands down has helped me with my many baking projects where I need to “wing it” or take pieces of various recipes to create my unique baking product.
Posted in Products with tags BenQ on September 20, 2024 by itnerd
BenQ makes great monitors. Every time they send me one for review, I tend to walk away impressed. Then the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX showed up via FedEx a last week. And I have to say that BenQ came up with a monitor that is almost perfect. Let’s start with the look of the monitor from the front:
This is a plain, black bezeled boring monitor if you look at it from the front. And that is the exact opposite of most gaming monitors that I encounter. The back is white and the monitor comes with a stand that is also white, but has a few orange/copper accents along with being height, swivel and tilt adjustable. I didn’t bother using that stand during my testing and instead mounted it to this monitor arm on my desk as the monitor has a VESA mount on the back. It also is devoid of any RGB lighting. This is a good move on BenQ’s part as they bill this as a gaming monitor, but they clearly designed it to be used in environments other than the basement of some guy who would only use this monitor only to play Call Of Duty Warzone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
There are two things that I would like to highlight on the back of the monitor. First is the 100×100 mm VESA mount that allows you to mount the monitor on your own stand as I did. The second is the significant amount of ports on this monitor. Here’s a list:
HDMI v2.1 eARC
2 x HDMI v2.1
DisplayPort v2.1
USB-C with 65W Power Delivery, DisplayPort Alt Mode, data transfer
USB-C upstream (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gbps, data transfer only)
3 x USB-A downstream (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gbps, power charging 4.5W)
USB-C downstream (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gbps, power charging 7.5W)
1/8″ headphone jack
That is a healthy selection of ports. But some of you might be noticing that in terms of the ports, the math doesn’t quite add up as you can’t see all of them. That’s because these ports are on the bottom left of the monitor:
This is another good move by BenQ as it makes these ports easy to access should you need them. I would have liked to see all of these USB ports being 10 Gbps ports rather than 5 Gbps ports. But they will work for most use cases. For those who need 10 Gbps or faster speeds, a thunderbolt dock might be your best option.
Pro Tip: I wasn’t getting 5 Gbps a second when I first started testing the ports on this monitor. That was until I noticed this when I was looking through the monitor settings:
Once I set it to USB 3.1 Gen1, I started to get the speeds that I was expecting.
I should note that there are no internal speakers, but the headphone jack has three different sound modes that provide a decent approximation of surround audio. And if you need better sound, you can plug in a soundbar into the eARC HDMI port and get your high quality sound fix that way. As a bonus, there’s KVM support. That means you can hook up a PC and Mac to this monitor for example and use one monitor, keyboard and mouse with both.
Also of note, this monitor comes with a remote control. It provides quick access to picture modes, settings memories, brightness, and the heads-up display with signal and frame rate info. I have to admit though that I took out of the box, fooled around with it to see what it controlled, and put it back into the box. That’s because the joystick at the bottom centre of the monitor does such a good job of allowing you to control the monitor’s features. I should also note that I had to find a CR2032 battery to get the remote up and running as I didn’t find one in the box. Speaking of being in the box, every cable you might need is in the box, along with an external power brick that those who cable manage all the things may not be fond of.
To test this monitor, I set it up with my M1 Pro MacBook Pro running macOS Sonoma version 14.6.1. I ran all my USB gear through the monitor and connected the monitor via USB-C to create a one cable setup that would keep my Mac charged as well as provide access to things like my webcam and the like. That worked fine although my Mac was only getting 65W of power which meant it is theoreticallypossible that if I pushed the MacBook Pro hard enough, the monitor would not be able to supply enough power to the laptop. As a result, the laptop battery would start to deplete until the load on the laptop lessens and the monitor can start charging the laptop battery up again. I wasn’t able to get my laptop to exhibit this in my testing. So I guess that’s a non-issue. But it would have been nice if the monitor put out say 90W so that wouldn’t be an issue with any laptop that has high power demands. Gaming laptops for example.
I ended up running this monitor at 2560×1440 with variable refresh rates of 48-144 Hz enabled. Now that sounds like a weird resolution for me to run a 4K monitor in. But this is why I set it up that way. macOS does something called display scaling. That’s where the monitor actually runs at 4K resolution. But the macOS UI is scaled to something less. And given that I am on the wrong side of 40 years old, 4K resolution on a Mac results in text that is too small for me to read comfortably. So I am using a resolution that balances having a lot of screen real estate with the ability to read text. I should also note that I am using this resolution with the “low resolution” option. That’s something else that is unique to macOS where if you pick a resolution that has this option, you turn off the ability to render everything in macOS’s “retina” mode where everything looks super sharp, and instead it renders everything “normally” for lack of a better description. While there is a difference between the “retina” mode and the “low resolution” option when it comes to text sharpness on the screen, the difference is really slight. Likely because this monitor is sharp and clear when it comes to how text looks on it. Also running in “low resolution” mode covers up a bug in macOS and M1 processors where you can’t run certain resolutions with variable refresh rates and HDR turned on. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on that, you can read the details here.
So with that out of the way, how does this monitor perform? Brilliantly for the most part.
From a basic productivity standpoint, this is a great monitor for productivity work. Text is sharp and clear as I mentioned previously. Though one thing that I noted was that when HDR is turned on, the Eye Care functionality which is handy for those who work for eight hours a day in front of a monitor gets turned off. I’m guessing that BenQ is doing this to preserve the quality of how HDR looks on the screen.
To further find out how good this monitor was, I drove the monitor to a client who is a professional photographer and photo editor so that he could use this tool on it in order to compare his results to the calibration report that was in the box. Yes you read that correctly, there was a calibration report in the box of a gaming monitor. I perhaps should not have been surprised by that as that’s how BenQ rolls. But I still was surprised. In any case, here’s what he told me after testing the monitor for about 45 minutes:
sRGB is spot on as he got an average error of just 1.37dE which from a colour accuracy perspective almost perfect. And this result was actually slightly better than the calibration report stated which was 1.38dE.
Display P3 had average error of 1.41dE. Which again is visibly perfect from a colour perspective.
In short, if you do colour accurate work, this monitor is a great option for you.
Now over to HDR. When you have HDR turned on, you get five HDR modes to choose from:
Honestly, your best option is to use the Display HDR option. I found it to be the mode that mostly matched what my MacBook Pro displays, and I was also assured by my client that this was the most colour accurate HDR mode to run the monitor. One thing that I should point out is that the MacBook Pro has a glossy screen that boosts the contrast of what is on your screen, and the BenQ monitor is a matte screen that dulls the contrast slightly as it’s meant to control reflections. It also means that dark areas on the monitor are slightly more dark than they perhaps should be. Which I am fine with because of the fact that I am in a room where controlling light is problematic. Thus I will take a matte screen any day of the week on any monitor that I use. But I can see where that might be a non-starter for some who want a more vibrant picture. You’ll also note that there are sRBG and Display P3 options for colour accurate work. But you’ll need to disable HDR to use those which is a bit of a bummer. I am thinking that BenQ must have felt that enabling HDR in those modes would take away from the colour accuracy that this monitor has. I should also note that this monitor supports FreeSync Premium Pro so anything from a PS5 to a gaming PC can have smooth visuals with this monitor. And by having it on is how I am getting support for variable refresh rates.
As for the HDR performance, let’s touch on some numbers first. The BenQ monitor has a mini LED panel with 1152 dimming zones. My MacBook Pro for comparison purposes has 2554 dimming zones, and the Apple Pro Display XDR has 576 local dimming zones. The BenQ monitor is capable of doing 1000 nits of brightness at its peak. Again for comparison purposes, my MacBook Pro and the Pro Display XDR can do 1000 nits sustained brightness, and 1600 nits peak brightness for HDR content. The reason why I am pointing all of this out because when it comes to mini LED monitors like this one, the more local dimming zones, the better the HDR performance in theory. While this monitor doesn’t have the same number of dimming zones as the built in display of my MacBook Pro, it has twice as many when compared to the Pro Display XDR. As for the brightness, the 1600 nits of brightness that the Apple monitors are capable of are in “peak” circumstances. Meaning that you mostly won’t see this in your day to day existence. Instead you will see 1000 nits. That makes these monitors somewhat compatible.
After running a number of HDR videos on this monitor, I can say that this BenQ display is outstanding. Fooling around with some games, as well as Blur Busters TestUFO to test the motion clarity, I found that there were no issues that I could find on that front. One big plus is that this is the first monitor that I have encountered where I could control the brightness of the monitor in HDR mode as most monitors outside the Pro Display XDR don’t have such a feature. That’s a very welcome feature and I applaud BenQ for including it. The next thing that I want to point out is blooming. Or rather the lack of it. Blooming is an issue where one local dimming zone will be so bright that it will overwhelm the local dimming zone next to it. For example if you have a really bright local dimming zone and a dark one next to each other, the dark one will look grey rather than black, or you might see what I call a halo effect. I ran a bunch of test videos that I know will generate blooming problems with HDR monitors and didn’t find much if any blooming to speak of. So then I ran some blooming tests which pushed the monitor to its 1000 nits maximum brightness, and I did see that there were some minimal levels of blooming. But it was so minimal that it’s unlikely that anyone would care, assuming that they even noticed at all. I don’t know what magic BenQ put in this monitor to get this result, but I was impressed.
A Few last things that I should mention. BenQ allows you to create profiles and save those so that you can switch between say a colour accurate setup and a gaming setup easily. And for bonus points, you can switch profiles via the joystick controller, or the remote control. You can also use a piece of software called Colour Shuttle to tailor this monitor to specific games if you want to go next level with your gaming experience.
So is this the perfect monitor? Well as I mentioned before, the USB ports could be 10 Gbps rather than 5 Gbps. I also wish you could at least have the option to use HDR in Display P3 and sRGB modes, and I wished that power delivery to a laptop was higher than 65W. But given the performance and capabilities of this monitor, I’m more than willing to let all of that slide. The BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX is an outstanding monitor that allows you to do anything from Microsoft Word to colour accurate work during business hours, to pwning n00bs in your video game of choice after hours. In fact, I think BenQ is selling this monitor short by calling it a gaming monitor for that reason because it’s a great all around monitor that fits a huge number of use cases. Which is why I will be asking BenQ if I could buy this monitor from them as this is the sort of monitor that I have been waiting for to pair with my MacBook Pro with since I got it in 2021. Expect to pay $1599 CAD for one of these monitors which sounds expensive, but I would argue that it’s money well spent given what this monitor brings to the table.
Recently Thermal Hero reached out to me and asked if I wanted to try out their Gamma Series Phase Changer & NEO Series Thermal Pads. This was a difficult one for me to do a review on as I no longer have any PC’s handy to test products that are designed to keep the components in your PC cool. Especially if you’re overclocking them. But as I tend to, I came up with a novel way to test these pads. Thus I agreed to the review.
My test equipment was not a PC, but a self built SSD. Specifically a SABRENT 1TB SSD Rocket NVMe m.2 4.0, Gen4 PCIe M.2 1TB SSD which was in this enclosure from Amazon that does USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps transfer speeds. When I built it originally for my tech sling, I had tried to use some thermal pads to keep the drive from frying itself. But the pads never really fit into the case properly as they would come off the drive and essentially be useless. Thus my plan was to try these Thermal Hero pads to see if I could do better. Now this drive really gets hot when I use it. According to the Digital Laser Temperature Reader that my wife used for cooking, the casing when I transferred over 300 GB of files hit a temperature of 45 Celsius and was hot to the touch. Here’s what I did to address that:
On the underside of the SSD, I cut a piece of the NEO series thermal pad and placed it on the biggest chip on that side of the drive. This pad was thicker, so I used that on the underside to make sure it would fill the space between the drive and the case.
On the other side of the drive I used the Gamma Series Phase Changer Thermal Pad as these pads arevery thin and I have much less space to work with in terms of the SSD touching the enclosure.
I reassembled the drive. Erased it. And then copied the same files over to the drive. In short, I was performing the same test to see what temperature I got. This time I got 38 Celsius on the drive using my wife’s Digital Laser Temperature Reader. Not only that I noted that the heat was more evenly distributed over the entirety of the case rather than being in a couple of areas when I didn’t have these thermal pads on the drive. Also, I should note that the case was simply warm to the touch as opposed to being bordering on untouchable because of the level of heat that any sort of usage would generate.
In short, these thermal pads work as advertised. In fact, they worked better than I was expecting.
What that suggests to me is that if your use case is to use these to act as an interface between your CPU and whatever you’re using to cool it. Be it a CPU fan or a liquid cooler, these thermal pads will work really well for those purposes. Not to mention this slightly unconventional use of them. If you are looking to do things like overclock your CPU, or just simply extend the life of the components in your PC build, you can head over to Thermal Hero’s website to have a look at the products that are on offer.
Posted in Products with tags Aqara on September 3, 2024 by itnerd
If you’re someone who has a lot of smart home gear, then the Aqua Hub M3 is something that you might be looking into to add to your smart home setup. The reason being that this hub does the following:
It’s a Matter controller that can work with non-Aqara Matter smart home devices
It’s a Thread border router
It has a two-way 360° infrared blaster that can be exposed to your smart home ecosystem to control devices that support IR control
It of course supports the Zigbee protocol
The first two items might be of value if you don’t already have a Matter controller or a Thread border router in whatever home ecosystem you are in. HomeKit users won’t care about this because if you have a HomePod or a recent AppleTV, you get Matter and Thread support in those devices. Which is why I won’t be testing that functionality as I review this product. On top of that, Aqara says that only a handful of Matter-compatible lights, switches, and thermostats are officially supported. And from what I can figure out, the same appears to be true for Thread devices. So that might limit the use cases that this hub can be used in. But having said that, if you do have devices that this hub supports, or Aqara broadens the support for Matter and Thread devices, this could be the “one hub to rule them all” as all your smart home devices could be run through this hub. The IR blaster could be useful for controlling non “smart” devices. But my use case doesn’t include any such devices. So I didn’t test that either.
Now let’s look at the Aqara Hub M3 hub:
If you compare this to the Aqara M1S Hub for example, it looks way better. Because it is a black square it doesn’t stand out. And the big ring light that was present in the M1S is gone in favour of a single LED on the front. Also included are a mounting bracket and a USB-C to USB-A cable. Not pictured are a set of screws for the mounting bracket as well as documentation.
One cool thing is that this can be powered by USB-C or by PoE. Which means in the case of the latter a single ethernet cable can supply data as well as power for a clean setup. Unless you use USB-C as that requires you to bring your own power adapter to the party. That’s a bit of a #Fail. But if you have a UPS that supports USB, you could power it that way I suppose.
Setting this up was….. Problematic. You need the Aqara app to start the setup process. That went well and guided me through getting the device into the app and updating the firmware. But things went off the rails when I tried to use the Aqara app’s ability to migrate from one hub to another. By migration I mean that if you have an old Aqara hub with a bunch of devices and automations, it will move those over to the M3. In my case, I wanted to move a door sensor with related automations over to the M3. But I tried twice and waited 10 minutes before it failed each time. I then started to troubleshoot by rebooting the M3 hub. At that point, I was prompted for a firmware update in the Aqara app that I promptly did. Why it didn’t prompt me to update to that firmware when I first set the hub up I don’t know. But after I did that the migration process worked and took only a minute. After doing some quick testing, I found that everything worked fine. Though it didn’t “feel” any faster than the M1S that it was replacing.
Next up was to delete the old hub from the Home app, which was painless, and add the new M3, which again didn’t go to plan. There is a HomeKit barcode on the back of the hub, and I tried to use that to add the M3 hub via the Home app on my iPhone.
#Fail.
Next up I tried to use the Aqara app to add the M3 hub to HomeKit.
#Fail.
I rebooted the hub and added it via the HomeKit barcode.
#Success
The other thing that I had to do is to add back all the notifications for things like doors opening and closing in HomeKit, along with setting up my HomeKit scenes to include the M3 as that understandably isn’t part of the migration process.
Total time invested: 45 Minutes
Given that this is supposed to be a consumer device, which means that it should be easy to set up to make sure that said consumers don’t flood a tech support line looking for help, these sorts of glitches and oddities should be the exception and not the rule. But in this case, they seem to be the rule. Which is of course bad.
Some other notes:
The M3 features 8GB of encrypted local storage for device lists, configuration parameters and automation data. Which means that if you have no Internet connection, your automations should still work.
The M3 claims to have a 95dB speaker, but in my testing, I could only register a max of 87dB. But that’s useful enough for an alarm system, which is how I am using this.
You can set the M3 up with one or more Aqara hubs to create a more resilient and efficient setup. In other words if one fails, another can take over.
From a WiFi perspective, it supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. I set the hub up on the latter to take one more device off of the 2.4 GHz band as I want to have as few devices on 2.4 GHz as possible on my WiFi network.
Here’s the bottom line. With all the glitches that I came across, it makes the Aqara Hub M3 a bit difficult to recommend. If Aqara can sort out these issues, that would likely make it a worthy upgrade for existing Aqara owners. For new owners, the M3 is only worth looking at if you need a Matter controller or a Thread border router. That won’t be the case for HomeKit users. But for other home ecosystems, it is worth looking at as long as you have Thread or Matter devices that the hub plays nice with. This hub goes for $169 CAD on Amazon. It’s worth a look if you have a use case for this hub, and you’re willing to deal with the bugs and oddities that seem to be part of the deal at the time of writing this review.
