I still remember how impressed I was when I was test driving this car. The comfort, the responsiveness and how luxurious the interior was compared to my old Honda HR-V. I thought I would keep driving this car as long as I can until it is time to move on.

Fast forward to 4 years later, I’m still loving this car. But the rise of Tesla and the ability to keep the aircon running when Im waiting in the car is just so nice.

And the problem with ICE car is that, I need to visit the mechanics twice a year for servicing. Im not sure why every time I go for servicing, there will be charges on top of the servicing packages that I have already paid for. I understand it’s all business, but still, it just doesn’t feel good. Not only that, every time the servicing will take almost a day to complete, I will need to rush back and forth between my office and the servicing center to collect my car and then go pick up my kids from school, its really annoying.

Finally, I decided it’s time for me to move on from ICE car to EV. In 2025, there are a lot of EV brands, and i finally settled with Tesla Model Y. The car interior is so minimalistic that it doesn’t feel like a car at all. Some might say why I would “downgrade” from Mercedes to Tesla? To be honest, I dont know is it consider a downgrade. The car may not be as luxurious as Mercedes, but the software it comes with is really feeling like an upgrade. So do I regret making this decision? I dont know yet, maybe in a few years I will change to Mercedes EV, but for now, I enjoy driving my Tesla Model Y.

I just discovered an easy-to-set-up OIDC provider that lets me log in to my self-hosted apps using passkeys.

I prefer passkeys over traditional usernames and passwords, but some of my self-hosted apps don’t support them natively. Pocket ID helped bridge that gap—now I can finally log in to my Immich instance with a passkey.

I have been a Synology NAS user for almost 10 years. The first one I used was an ARM based 212j. It worked well and the DSM software was really nice and polished.

After a few years, I upgraded it to an Intel based 218+ due to the 212j power supply failed. It still works after I replaced the power supply, but I wanted an upgrade to a better CPU.

The primary use case of the NAS for me is to back up all my family photos and all the medias that I have collected over the years. I used two 4TB HDDs to store all the data, the HDDs are slow, but mainly I used it to store data only, so its acceptable.

After I have kids, I started to stream media from my NAS more often. The slow HDDs slowly become an issue. For example, when I’m copying some videos from my Mac to the NAS, it will become so unresponsive to a point that I cant even stream anything anymore, even accessing it using the DSM webUI also not possible. It will only become accessible when the data copy is done.

I wanted to try full SSD NAS for quite some time, but the cost per GB delta between SSD and HDD was too big to be possible. Fast forward to 2025, there is still delta between the 2 but its close enough for me to try it finally.

Originally, I wanted to replace the two HDDs from my Synology NAS to two SATAs SSD. But I have a few NVMe SSDs from my old PC that are sitting around doing nothing, so I decided to utilize it instead of letting it sit there gathering dust. Unfortunately, the Synology 218+ was old enough that doesnt support NVMe, so instead of buying a new Synology NAS that supports NVMe just to test out this full SSD NAS idea, I used a Raspberry Pi 5 to share these NVMe SSDs using Samba.

To my surprised, the Raspberry Pi 5 worked really well. No more unresponsiveness when copying files between the drives anymore, and the power consumption is so low that its only taking around 5 to 6W under load, it about the the same power used when the two HDDs are hibernating in the Synology 218+!

After testing this setup for a few weeks, I decided its time to retire my Synology NAS and completely switch over to my DIY setup. I’m happily using this octopus like setup ever since, until I watched this mini PC review from Jeff Geerling.

The little white box in the middle caught my eyes immediately. After watching the detailed review from Jeff, even though he didn’t pick the white box, which is Beelink Me Mini as the machine that he is gonna use in his homelab, but still, this machine fits all my requirement. So I picked it up, put all my NVMe SSDs in and then installed Open Media Vault as my NAS OS. The experience is good far, CPU performance is definitely an upgrade to my Raspberry Pi5. Files transfer between my computers to this NAS is also on par with the Pi 5. And the most importantly, my setup is no long octopus like, everything just fit inside this little white box. Power consumption is a little bit more than the Pi5, but at least it decluttered my homelab. 🙂

この傘をくれた人、ありがとうございます。

祇園金瓢で金瓢を。

Raining today.

I didn’t realize it is already 2 years since I started using a Windows on ARM laptop. I used it only for my office work and the overall experience was ok, it has amazing battery life and ok performance.

Somehow, the user feedback on 8cx Gen 3 was very negative, until it triggered the upper management to completely replace it with X Elite, the latest and newest chip that was designed completely in house.

The moment I start using it and I can already tell it is different, it is so much more snappier than the old one. I hope the software can continue to evolve and one day ARM can finally replace x86.

I don’t remember when was the last time I bought a CD. I recently bought one CD released more than 20 years ago and today it is finally delivered.

I don’t have a CD player anymore, so the first thing I needed to do was buying an USB CD/DVD reader. To my surprise, not just CD/DVD reader is still a thing, it even comes with USB C connector.

I was worried that the computers I have will not be able to use the USB disc reader. But surprisingly, not only my M1 Mac Mini is able to use it, it even plug and play without any driver installation needed.

Not sure why, when I start to rip the CD using Music app, the drive shut off by itself. I tried a few times and the same thing happened.

So I decided to plug this disc drive to my NUC which is running Bazzite. I didn’t expect it to work, but turns out, I was just thinking it too much.

As soon as I put in my CD, within seconds, all the disc info was pulled from the internet—it brought back so many memories. 💿

Now, let me enjoy my music. 🤭