The battery problem Unfortunately old, long term unused Cybiko Classics suffer from exploded batteries. Worse, the residue will eat away at the original battery contacts, and will even begin to damage the motherboard if left in for long enough. Get the batteries that are in there out as soon as possible, and clean the battery contacts as well as the Cybikos own contacts as best you can. You may also consider disassembling the Cybiko to clean any residue that may have gotten to the motherboard.

Tl;Dr: In this blog post, I discuss the problem I have with having an external DAC (cable clutter), and the hacky solution I came up with (putting a USB DAC inside the chassis of my computer and hijacking the HD-Audio solution built into most PC cases). The problem I recently became dissatisfied with my motherboard audio solution, so I investigated DACs and found the Fiio K3. The difference compared to the onboard motherboard audio was that the headphones could be driven louder (unsurprising) but the bass specifically seemed ’tighter' and more defined.

Firstly, you might want to check out the dashboard. I recently started a diet. One thing I decided this time around was to be heavily data driven in my weight loss, and therefore I decided to get some ‘smart’ weighing scales. I got the Eufy P1 scales which seemed to be reasonably well reviewed, and it turns out that Eufy is another name for Anker, another Chinese brand I’ve had success with in the past.

Addendum: The most controversial detail in this blog post so far has been my claim that disabling uPnP is a significant hit to convenience. I wanted to be fully transparent and say that I do not have data to back this claim up, and this is more of a feeling than it is an analytical decision. This criticism somewhat misses the point however, since the vast majority of consumer routes I’ve encountered personally have uPnP enabled by default, and the consumers purchasing this NAS might have no idea what uPnP is or how to disable it.

So, it turns out that a lot of smart gear from many manufacturers, including ones you’ve almost certainly heard of, comes from a company called Tuya. They seem to make all sorts of fun IOT gear, which all connects to the Tuya cloud. What Tuya seem to do is sell whitelabeled ‘versions’ of their products to various brands who then sell them as if they’d manufactured them themselves. Very interesting right?

My trusty old USB 3 hub has failed. It was only around a year old, but it was cheap and it worked. It wasn’t powered, but most of the time it didn’t need to be. One day I began having very strange issues with USB on my computer. Devices randomly disconnecting, devices never connecting until the computer was rebooted and so on. I eventually narrowed it down to the hub. I tossed it out after a quick internal inspection had revealed nothing obviously wrong, and went shopping for a new hub.

As a kid, I used to love playing Minecraft. I was technically precocious from a fairly young age, and naturally gravitated to attempting to host my own Minecraft server for me and my band of geeky pals to play on. The problem was, I had no idea what port forwarding was, nor how to log into a router. The solution I found was about as novel as it was dumb.