By Rian

Gray, a writer.

Pacific Drive Spiel

If driving through tense situation is up your alley, Pacific Drive may have been on your radar. Contrary to what many reviews warned, the brutal RNG of rogue-like setting, the touch of survival car maintenance, with the flavor of sci-fi horror, the game slugs through them like a checklist. None of them truly mean anything…

Electrophobia Fueled EV-Phobia in South Korea

An EV in South Korea caught fire out of the blue; the car was parked and it was not charging. It burned down 140+ vehicles parked on the same underground parking and damaged the water main and power lines for the building. The reports so far fortunately said there were no injuries, and residents were…

Detroit: Become Human Spiel

Sci-fi has a weird tick. Sci-fis I’ve read, watched, and played usually begin with a genius —a genius who makes the breakthrough. It is a breakthrough none has ever witnessed, and it is a breakthrough that will be a new founding of a future society. And the story arc of the world builder often correlates…

How to Fix HomePod Setup Failed (401)

1st gen. HomePod is officially classified a “vintage” by Apple. I, for one, who benignly thought HomePod’s role in HomeKit is also depreciated, had to re-add the HomePod back to the home app. Symptoms When adding a HomePod to existing home in HomeKit, the app would produce “Setup Failed (401)” message after the login and…

Popular App Bartender Buy-out Raises Security Concerns

Probably the most unwanted surprise for many macOS users. The popular macOS app, Bartender, is indeed sold to an unknown third-party. Speculations seem to lead that the new owner is an iOS app publisher, but that is the least of our —or mine— concern. Not only Bartender already needed critical permissions to run, if you…

How to Set Time Machine Quota on NAS

I don’t recall Time Machine having a quota feature when it was originally announced back in OS X Leopard. Most users would use any hard drive lying around, and if needed, can set up a pseudo-quota by creating a volume in Disk Utility. Preface This method requires to setup a new destination. When I was…

How to Fix Erroneous Apple Music Geoblock Message

Being a music streaming platform, Apple Music isn’t free from geoblock. Or better yet, Apple Music and others are generally not from licensing disagreement often found in music industry. I personally find it odd that interested parties behind a streaming agreement would rather pull the song down, rather than keeping the fees on the balance…

How to Troubleshoot iRobot Roomba j7+ not Self-Emptying

iRobot Roomba lines —robot vacuums— are popular for its unusually powerful vacuums, but frankly lost its shine in recent years in convenience and smart departments. It’s late in the games with self-emptying, vacuum & mop combo, and self-cleaning or self-exchanging mop pads. But regardless, Roomba has its place as one of the finest robot vacuum…

Finding K-Pop Nyan Song

I was listening to Korean radio today. As a classical music fan, radio isn’t exactly my go-to for musics, but the radio was on nonetheless. Then it hit me like a freight truck. Or, like a tabby cat suddenly jumping on my laps so I chocked a little with some coffee in my mouth. It…

Why Apple Vision Pro Launched without Physical Controllers

Ever since the launch of iPhone back in 2007, I’ve seen my fair shares of analysts losing their jobs —or losing their employers’ business prospect— over misconceptions on one thing, and one thing only: physical controllers. Be it may keyboard, stylus, mouse, there were always analyses on new products based on unfounded belief that it…

How to Band-Aid Fix SteamAPI Initialization Issue on macOS

I do want to make it clear that this isn’t the usual ‘how to fix’ tips post. Instead, I’m hoping to log what I’ve learned for indexing purposes. I do have a band-aid solution for the time being, but I wouldn’t call this an ideal fix. Perhaps someone will pick up where I left off,…

GM to Replace Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with “Ultifi”

Yes, the air-quote is real. GM is planning to replace Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, both smartphone based infotainment systems on cars, with GM’s own flavor of Android Automotive. Tim Babbitt, GM’s head of product for infotainment, says one of the factors behind the decision was safety. Safety is something I see thrown around on…

eBook Reader App and Streaming Player App Spiel

Back in 2015 or so, I wrote a short op-ed that was ill-received, calling for better ebook management features on Kindle platform. It’s been 8 years, but I see little to no changes in the app, and frankly, with the gorgeous displays and extended battery life used in most smartphones and tablets, I see little…

USB-C is on iPhone, But Type-C is still a Mess

I have written in several pieces that USB-C is not the silver bullet to the dongle problems. Even as Apple opened up its Lightning walled garden, presenters couldn’t simply say: ‘we have USB-C now’. It needed to be said what kind of spec this port will carry: how fast its USB protocol will be, how…

How to Setup VPN VLAN for Home

Not all countries run DPI, nor do all websites block people based off of region. I, for one, started building my own geoblock-proof setup since I moved to the new neighborhood about a decade ago. HomeDepot had this neighborhood IPs blocked. I don’t know what my ISP was thinking assigning blacklisted commercial IP to residential…