I’ve had a wish to learn electronics for a very long time, and this year I took the plunge and bought some kit to get started. Here’s the stuff I bought and some other resources I found useful. Hardware Keyes electronics kit SMP0051 NodeMCU ESP8266 Lua WiFi Internet Development Board (alternative to Arduino) Raspberry Pi3 Official […]

Gmail stores years of your life — receipts, contracts, medical records, conversations you’d hate to lose. Google can and does lock accounts, sometimes with no warning and no clear appeal process. Accidental deletions happen. And relying entirely on a cloud service you don’t control is just poor data hygiene. If you’re thinking about switching away […]

I’ve been hosting WordPress sites since 2012. In that time I’ve used cheap shared hosting, had a provider literally disappear overnight taking all my data with it, and eventually migrated everything to managed WordPress hosting. Today I run 15+ sites across three managed hosts: Kinsta, WP Engine, and Servebolt. This isn’t a generic comparison post. […]

It’s important that before you start you understand the concept of volumes on Synology Diskstations, because that’s the first thing you will need to set up before you set up Time Machine backups. Volumes on the Synology Diskstation You can use the Synology RAID calculator to help determine how you want to set up volumes. That being […]

When you enable SSL on a Synology Diskstation, accessing it over the local network will throw up a selection of security warnings on browsers. There are 3 choices here for the LAN user: Ignore the warnings and click through Register an Internet FQDN to your local IP Create a self-signed SSL and root CA to […]

The Synology DiskStation is a great tool for backing up your files and acting as a central media storage device. Since it will host so much important data — family photos, documents, backups of all your devices — securing it properly is critical. Out of the box, a Synology NAS is reasonably secure, but there […]

Two-factor authentication or 2FA is a way of making your logins more secure, by not only requiring a username and password when signing in, but also a special extra code that can either be received as an SMS or else generated by an app or device. Most of you will already have used 2FA, perhaps […]

  A while back I wrote a guide to backing up one’s important digital assets. In that post, I mentioned that I decided to go for Synology instead of the Drobo, specifically the Synology DiskStation DS916+. Apart from the negative comments on the Drobo, I had also begun to understand the potential of NAS technology in […]

Losing files you can’t replace — years of photos, client work, journal entries — is a question of when, not if. A hard drive fails, a laptop gets stolen, ransomware hits. The difference between a bad day and a catastrophic one is whether you have a backup. This guide covers backup strategy, the best Mac […]

Apple’s iCloud ecosystem has grown significantly over the years, but it can still be confusing — especially if you’re trying to understand how backup, storage, photos, and file sync all fit together. Here’s a clear breakdown of what each component does and how to use them effectively.

Having logins to more than 500 websites and having to remember them all is no joke. It’s one of those areas where software is not just helpful but essential. A password manager generates strong, unique passwords for every site and fills them in automatically. You only need to remember one master password. I started off […]