When you buy products online, especially from Chinese websites like Aliexpress or Gearbest, you might be a bit doubtful of whether the products they sell are original.

This is especially the case for small electronic goods like camera batteries. The best way to determine whether a good is fake or not is to do the following.

First, before buying, closely inspect the wording of the seller’s description. Sometimes they will write the model number in the title and use the wording “original”, but in the finer print details further down below they will not include the brand or the words “genuine” and “original”. This would usually mean it’s not an original item.

After buying, closely inspect the packaging and item and compare it to the originals. If that seems to be the same (any differences should make you seriously doubt the authenticity of the product), you can check the weight of the product. This is usually a clear giveaway. For example, I have some original Sony and Canon camera batteries, and the fake ones I bought are just a few grames lighter, while all the originals are exactly the same weight.

Looking for a new theme for your WordPress website or getting started with WordPress? There are thousands of themes out there and your website creation journey can get stalled right there as you search and search for the right theme, possibly making some bad choices.

I’ve been in the WP space for more than ten years now so I’ve seen it all.

Here’s what I consider the best themes for 2023:

• Astra
• GeneratePress
• OceanWP

I would pair these with a page builder, and the number one choice right now is Elementor.

If you can’t decide between the three themes above, consider the following:

• OceanWP has the most design options and flexibility, although the others come close.
• Astra and GeneratePress focus more on being lightweight and speed optimized.
• Astra has integrations that the others don’t yet offer, for example, LifterLMS and LearnDash.
• GeneratePress has the best public support forum so if you’re a beginner building your first site this could be an important consideration.

In the end, you won’t go wrong with any of those three themes.

Learning how to build themes

If you’re interested in WordPress theme development, Chris Coyier has an excellent resource post on the topic.

If you ever had the misfortune of having a disk corrupted you know how bad it feels to lose your files. Here are some tips on recovering files on a Mac.

First, a word of advice. Before using your cards on photographic equipment, always format them so you make sure that you’re starting from a clean and well-structured drive. Failure to do so increases the chances of corrupted data and makes it messier to recover files later.

If you’re already in possession of a disk with corrupted data, you need a fix. I analyzed the following software packages in my evaluation:

• Easeus Data Recovery
• Recoverit
• Disk Drill
• PhotoRec and TestDisk

The first three are premium software packages, while the last-one is open source and is a command-line utility, so it might look a bit harder to use. If you have the patience to learn how to run software from the command line and you have time to read the manual, then you’ll be fine.

In fact, this is my favorite software for recovering files and fixing otherwise broken file systems.

From the other three software packages, only Easeus Data Recovery got me results as good as the PhotoRec and TestDisk combo. I would, therefore, recommend it if you want software that is user-friendly and does the job. I wasn’t impressed with the other two as they were either not that straightforward to use or didn’t recover files as well as my favorite picks.

Here are my notes on copying remote keys for your garage.

Some garage door companies lock the reception box so you cannot add any more remotes unless you go through them. This is what most people do anyway. It’s a perfectly valid way of going about things, but you give these companies the opportunity to charge you 50-100 euros when you can do it yourself for half price or less.

If you want to do it yourself, read on.

You will need to buy the HR Matic remote which is the best remote I found. You can buy it on Amazon or directly from the manufacturer and distributors.

Some remotes have fixed codes and others have rolling codes, which makes them harder to copy. You might need to open the receiver box in your garage and press a button on the board to add your new remote control to the list of allowed remotes.

[Read more…]

I don’t like using Apple’s applications and proprietary file storage types for photos. I like it old school where I can just drag photos from my devices to my external drive in a folder and organize them manually via folders.

Storing photos on iCloud is a privacy concern that not many people care about, but I do so I prefer to avoid it.

I’ll therefore talk about how I manage the exporting process of images from my iPhone to my local storage.

iMazing Backup

A couple of years ago I started using iMazing Backup which is an excellent software for Mac that enables me to bypass the whole Apple silo by making my own automated backups of Apple devices we have in the family over Wi-Fi. So the main reason I purchased it was to have an iCloud backup alternative.

However, it is also an excellent manager for Apple devices. I frequently use it to drop PDF books onto my iPad, for example. The process is extremely easy.

Another use case for me is exporting images from my phone onto local storage. I like to keep my phone as clean as possible and export all my photos every month or so. The disadvantage is that I don’t have easy access to all my photos, but on the other hand I know that my photos are safe and backed up at all times.

iMazing Backup has an excellent photo and video expert utility that also includes some smart folders. You can read about how it all works on iMazing’s guide.

This tool lets me export all images including the live photos (which in reality are short video clips) as well as original versions of edited photos. You can also choose to automatically convert from HEIC to JPEG and also change the naming structure of the photos.

Image Capture (My Previous Method)

This had been my go-to method prior to starting to use live photos. I then realized that this method would not export the live photos but only the still version. So I had to stop using this method.

Here’s how to do that process to transfer photos from an iPhone to an external drive, or anywhere on your Mac for that matter.

1. Connect Your External Hard Drive To Your Mac. First, connect the hard drive to your Mac and make sure it shows up in the Finder’s sidebar.
2. Connect Your iOS Device To Your Mac.
3. Launch Image Capture.
4. Select Destination.
5. Click Import.

What to do if you already have your photos in the Photos app

If you had already used the Mac Photos app to import your photos from the phone, and you now want to export the individual photo files, you should follow these steps:

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.
2. Hold down the Option (⌥) key while dragging images to the Finder.

All of the original parameters of your images will be entirely preserved. In Photos 1.0, dragging an image out of the app would save your selection as a downscaled JPEG file. In the most recent release, dragged images retain their original resolution but are still recompressed as JPG files.

Note that I’ve had problems copying a whole album at once if it has a lot of photos in it. I’m not sure if it’s a general issue or just a local thing on my setup. What I do in that case is just select smaller batches of photos to move over.