Region-changing on old systems has become something of a quiet craze — remote work and streaming have made it a growing necessity that cannot be ignored anymore. Apple was relatively late to the game; as far as I know, the region-change program didn’t gain real traction until 2020. Now in 2026, the documentation is conflicting, even from Apple itself, on where the program actually stands.
By Rian
Gray, a writer.
How to Upgrade NVMe on Unsupported Synology NAS
Synology is known for making reliable HDD network storage, not NVMe. The few articles I found often recommended building your own NAS for NVMe, given the general reliability of SSD and price to performance ratio. While I agree on the principle, for those of us who already own a Synology branded NAS, there is no reason to avoid using M.2 slots on Synology NAS. There are scripts to enable a pool creation for this very purpose. And this is the part where I could not find documentation on. How do I go about upgrading a storage from 512 GB to…
App to Discover IP Addresses for Proxy Switchers
If you are using a rule-based proxy switcher, checking IP addresses for each proxy could easily get out of hand. It is possible to stop the auto-routing and force the connection for manual testing, but that is not what I wanted to do with a browser extension.
Quest to Find Ergonomic Keyboard of Today
Remember Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard? It was legendary in retrospect. It was a tenkeyless design with a detached numpad, yet fully functional as a full-sized keyboard. It didn’t need additional software to set up — it was pure plug and play. I had written simple configurations for Sculpt Keyboards before; it was a testament of what the ergonomic keyboard was capable of.
How to Band-aid Fix macOS Music App Freezing on Launch
The app in question is the Music app bundled with every Mac, not to be confused with the streaming service from the same company. And unfortunately, I was not able to narrow down what causes the issue. Upon opening the app, none of the UI is working. The only recourse, even though the app is not “unresponsive”, was to quit it.
“Ethical Concern” is AI Dunce Cap
Storage is at an all-time premium nowadays, with even the price of SSDs and HDDs being affected by AI craze. As much as I would love to say ‘rip the discs raw’, there is bound to be a real world limit on how much storage I can secure for a self-hosted media server. My search for encoding these raws led me to looking for configurations used by others, and for what it’s worth, their activity could easily translate into online piracy. Claude shut down the conversation immediately, citing my query as equivalent to looking for a black-market arms dealer.
Google Announced “Honey” Dipped in AI
Just last year, browser extension Honey suffered an infamous scandal. Now owned by PayPal, the extension promised to find the best deal, including finding the best coupon codes. The exposé revealed Honey’s business model focused more on being a man in the middle in both security and transaction. And it also reveals a gap, a bias between what buyers think they do and what they actually do.
How to Set Complex Repeating Pattern on iOS Reminders
It was always possible to set more complex repeating pattern using Shortcuts. However, at least from my experience, Shortcuts automation do fail horrendously, when it needs to run in the background. These are some edge cases that I have the latest Reminders could not handle on its own:
How to Run Python Script from iOS Home Screen
On iOS, Pythonista is likely the go-to Python environment runtime for many script writers. I, for one, recommend using Pythonista for any projects that need some horsepower. As I have shared many times, one such problem was generating passwords. It is completely doable on Shortcuts, only that it would be so cumbersome to make it happen.
Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Spiel Pt. 2
As a long running series, there wasn’t much I could say about gameplay aspect in Lord of Hatred in the previous piece. And now that we have discussed the parts that are on the surface without going into spoiler territory, I thought to touch on the areas that it is plot critical. Much of the heavy lifting the expansion does for the franchise, I believe it has to do with the plot element.
The Case of the ‘Indulgent’ Subscription
Bit of context before I get into the whole fiasco. The choke point of physical ownership is real estate. Everyone who has ever tried owning every contents would know this. At some point, medium takes up more space than the media: books, movies, musics, video games, just about all of them. Movies, especially, would hit close at home for most of us. VHS, Betamax, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, the list of mediums are keep growing for the same movie. And some of the mediums haven’t even survived its own era. Streaming has solved this, albeit at a price.
Raspberry Pi, RAM, and Home Labs
Most of my Raspberry Pis have been decommissioned. I had used Docker and Docker only on Pis, so much of the effort was on focused compatibility and reliability of single machine (Synology NAS) doing all the work. For the record, Synology couldn’t do everything off the shelves. I had to upgrade the RAM from default 4 GB to 20 GB. And I am running most of the DBs on m.2 drives to ensure faster read and write. The question I have now is simple. What will I do with Pi boards?
Closed Captioning is a Must
For the life of me, I do not know why YouTube still doesn’t officially support closed captioning on PiP. As much as I appreciate overall better audio qualities even from a beginner YouTuber, the problem stands. Unless I am watching a podcast video uploaded onto YouTube, a video of people talking in perfectly sterilized studio, there is bound to be some background noises, some other audios mixing in. It’s only natural, even big time Hollywood movies and TV shows suffer from it. The difference I am pointing out is how these platforms handle the problem. Of which, YouTube is slowly…
App to Automatically Sync Subtitles to Videos
As I was going through my media library, there was one thing I noticed consistently — I am more or less after the fan-made subs than the rips themselves. The official subtitles tend to miss out on the clever wordplays, crude jokes, pretty much anything that is not broadcast-friendly in both literal and financial sense. But at the same time, I also consistently notice fan-made subtitles are out of sync by 1/4 seconds or so.
Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Spiel
Vessel of Hatred, the previous expansion, left quite a lot to be desired. It only introduced a new class to the game; it added a new region; it unfolded some of Mephisto’s plans. But ultimately, aside from some powerful cinematic in and out of the game, it was a filler between the stories. Lord of Hatred is the conflict Diablo IV needed, all the way to the resolution.