Author: Louis Page 2 of 115

Quick review of Mi True Wireless Earphones 2

On May 1, 2020

This is not your typical unboxing.

I am sharing my own experience of using the Mi True Wireless Earphones 2 (shortened to Mi TWE2 from now on) for a week. I used these earphones during work commute (walk + cycle), in the office (relatively quiet, not shop/factory floor type of noise) and at home (mostly Youtube and music listening in FLAC format). For home use, I am normally a HD650 open-back headphone user, looking for something to use on daily commute and the occasional office calls, so the two qualities I am interested in are: decent sound quality, and good for phone/app calls. I own the Edifier W2000BT but Mi TWE2 is the first pair of true wireless that I have used for more one hour.

Switching host: Update 1

By Louis

On August 3, 2019

In Internet, WordPress

I have been using open-source web-based photo album organiser Gallery for a long time, starting (around 2003) with Version 2 and now on (the final) Version 3. In fact it’s been so long ago that I have forgotten why I made the decision initially, except vaguely recalling something along the lines that I was looking an application based around PHP and MySQL (around the time the term LAMP stack was coined) photo gallery software Gallery, and there wasn’t anything else as feature-rich and user friendly at the time. My needs are fairly basic so I have not re-evaluated other choices since upgrading to Gallery 3.

Now, due to the recent decision to move host, I discovered two things while attempting to migrate Gallery. One is that Gallery has not been actively maintained since 2014. The second thing is that the MySQL dump from Gallery apparently exceeded the file size limit (50MB) for uploading to my new host using phpMyAdmin and the command line route is also out (certain errors during importing that I could not track down). This led to the slightly annoying situation of needing to find a new photo album software. By the way, although briefly experimenting with Flickr (which has also become history, as they say), I am more for keeping content on my own server.

A quick Google search showed I was not the only one having the same predicament. Taking the easy (ie. lazy) route I decided to follow the advice of more knowledgeable users such as the below and migrated to Piwigo. I must say, it’s been good after a week’s use. read more

A new lease of life for Mi Pad

By Louis

On July 28, 2019

In Gadgets

Xiaomi’s Mi Pad was launched in 2015 to the global markets with above average specs. Unfortunately being a 4-year-old product means development and support for it was going to end sooner or later. This is simply another consequence of the fast-paced nature of the smartphone-tablet market. The last official build was MIUI 7 based on Android Kitkat (China version was supported up to MIUI 9).

Frankly, although the Mi Pad sported the decent NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor, paired with a measly (by today’s standard) 2GB RAM and 16GB ROM (now THIS is terrible…), it does come with a high resolution 1080p IPS screen (326PPI). This makes the tablet a rather good media consumption device.

A few months ago, I decided to dust off a couple of Mi Pads that I had and started to look for third party ROMs that can extend Mi Pad’s usefulness. Below are the steps which I used to flash LineageOS Unofficial 15.1 (Android Oreo), for my own benefit should I need to reflash in the future. It’s a combination of steps I found from multiple sources. For those who may be unfamiliar with this Android Distribution, LineageOS is the successor to the custom ROM CyanogenMod. read more

Switching host yet again

By Louis

On July 21, 2019

In Internet, WordPress

A couple of months ago, I was informed that my current web hosting company Webfaction was merging with GoDaddy, although it sounded more like a take-over frankly hosting issues would be handled by GoDaddy since moving forward. The whole process was set to be finalised in a month or two. Since GoDaddy has never been high on my list of web hosting companies, I started to shop around for a new home for the few domains that I own.

The final decision was reached after reading these few articles:

https://justfreethemes.com/best-hosting-services/
https://winningwp.com/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting/
https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-wordpress-hosting/
https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting/
https://hostingfacts.com/hosting-reviews/siteground/
https://www.shivarweb.com/7970/siteground-hosting-review/
https://www.websitehostingrating.com/siteground-vs-bluehost/

I guess it’s kind of obvious that SiteGround was ranked highly but I still had some reservations about the renewal price, seeing that I am mostly dealing with WordPress sites plus the occasional trials of other software.

Use Asana for planning

By Louis

On July 21, 2019

In Productivity

As a follow up to the previous post, I wanted to quickly share this video on how to use Asana for planning. This makes use of a neat feature in Asana where you can assign multiple projects to the same task. Incidentally this is also the same trick that allows me to see projects in both List and Kanban views.

There are more productivity tips by the author, so check out the channel for other videos if you are interested in the topic.