The Corsair/Elgato Stream Deck Mk 2 has some peculiar behavior when you try and connect to it using USB-C. Initially I thought that I had wired up my keystones incorrectly, or my USB-C ports were on acting up. Nope — it’s the Stream Deck.

We recently had a longer power outage. Thankfully, I’ve got a pair of UPS units ready to rock and roll but I ran into a bit of an odd case where my NAS units were in a blinking state after the power was restored…

My work laptop was up for a refresh, and not soon enough — my previous laptop no longer wanted to communicate with the battery. For work, we typically use these laptops as if they were desktops — outside of meetings, they are docked to power, external monitors, keyboards, mice, network etc. so I’m going to look at this machine as if it was a desktop.

This laptop is also my first encounter with Windows 11, so that should be fun.

Over the year-end break, I moved my password manager away from LastPass. I didn’t move for security reasons but more so for usability issues and the security issues were purely an unfortunate coincidence. I used this transition as an opportunity to do a full audit of the credentials and I stumbled across some fun (read: annoying) discoveries.

For the last few years now, every time I log into the management portal for my NAS, I have to click through the annoying ‘this page is untrusted’ warnings from Chrome. Enough is enough, I finally set aside some time to fix this.

Most of the guides online seem to be built around getting LetsEncrypt hooked up (which I don’t want) or they were written with DSM6 in mind…

Sadly, DSM7+ removed the ability to easily generate a self-signed cert so I had to do it ‘the long way’

The snappiness of my new phone was a bit out of place with the sluggishness of my old smartwatch so I set out to ‘just take a look’ at what options are on the market. Just looking at the headline features of almost every smartwatch out there, you’d think the user-base consists entirely of olympians and/or sleep-apnea patients. Thankfully my needs are a bit simpler: just reliably relay notifications to my watch.

I’ve been planning on a phone upgrade in the next year or so but my wife had the misfortune of breaking her phone recently. This was a perfect excuse to push that schedule up a bit sooner. It was a bit of an adventure picking out a new phone and then dealing with the various challenges in getting the phone into what I would consider a ‘usable’ state.

Two is one and one is none, right? Or at least that’s the mantra of preparedness as I understand it. Recently, I had the fun opportunity to have multiple component hardware failures. Now that I’m back up and running, this makes for a good time to take a closer look at my backup strategy and how I can improve it.

Over the last few years, upgrading to a ‘smart home’ has been all the rage. The typical party-trick automation is pretty cool but in practice, tends to come up a bit short. Perhaps looking at something a bit less ‘smart’ can make for a more effective system.

Working from home can be a wonderful thing if you have a totally dialed-in workspace but one of the biggest gotchas is that, (generally), at some point -- you're going to have to use a sorry excuse of a computer to get stuff done. Some work machines are better than others, but so, so, soooooo many are mobility focused paper weights.

I took a non-standard approach to integrating the work machine into my flow and because of this, I had to come with some creative workarounds for challenges around meetings and such that popped up.