Category: General Tech

Garmin has joined the likes of Fitbit and Whoop, and is now offering a screen-free fitness tracker, named the Cirqa.

Andrew Liszewski at The Verge:

The smart band can track more than 80 different activities such as running or yoga that are selectable through the accompanying Garmin Connect app or using its single side button as a shortcut to your favorite. Through the app, you can monitor your training progress including the effectiveness of a workout and whether your body is ready for your next training session or would benefit more from a rest day.

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Om Malik’s family:

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

I’ve read Om’s writing since before starting this site over 17 years ago. It is hard to believe he won’t be lighting up my RSS reader anymore.

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It’s been a while since I’ve written about my home network, which I totally rebuilt after moving last year.

Here is my rack as it stands today:

I am all in on UniFi gear, as you can see from all the Apple-like aluminum hardware in that photo. From top to bottom, here is how things are set up:

• Cable Modem: My Comcast connection comes straight into this and is then passed to my network over a 2.5 GbE Ethernet connection.
• Dream Machine Special Edition: This is my gateway. In the UniFi world, this is what manages the entire network, including routing, the firewall, content filters, and more. The Dream Machine can be used to run Protect, UniFi’s home security and camera system, and even record footage with its built-in hard drive, but I have a standalone Protect box further down the stack, as when I initially built this out, I was not using a gateway with its own storage. The Dream Machine uses Comcast as its upstream Internet connection, but it can fail over to my backup ISP — a super-slow AT&T DSL connection.¹ That green fiber optic cable runs to a workshop off my garage, where I have a secondary switch running two of my cameras and one wireless access point.
• A 24-port patch panel with a hodgepodge of keystones.
• My main switch is a Pro Max 24 PoE. Yes, its name is terrible and a rip-off of Apple’s terrible naming, but it’s a heck of a switch. I use its two SFP ports to connect it to the Dream Machine and to my NAS. It has a handful of 2.5 GbE ports that I use for connections at my desk and for my access points. The colors correspond to the connected device’s link speed, making it easy to see at a glance if something is acting up.
• Below the switch is my UNVR, or network video recorder. I have three cameras, and all their footage is stored locally on this device. This is overkill for just three cameras, but I already had it (and had opened it up to install quieter fans), so it is here to stay.
• The next two rack units are a bit deceiving. At the front of the rack is a mere placeholder, but at the back is Unifi’s Power Distribution Pro, which is basically a networked power strip. When paired with the UPS at the bottom of the rack, the Dream Machine can shut down network equipment individually if the power is out and the UPS is nearly depleted. I could do this with just the UPS, but it doesn’t have enough battery-backed outlets for the rest of the gear in the rack, so I run everything through the PDU Pro instead.
• That box full of hard drives is the UNAS Pro, UniFi’s older rack-mountable NAS product. It lacks some of the niceties of UniFi’s newer offerings (like the ability to use an SSD as a cache to speed up file access), but it works well enough for what I need. I should note that this is not something like a Synology that can run things like Docker containers. I just needed a bunch of storage on my network.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the rack itself is actually two Toolless Mini Racks stacked together. Had I known I would need so much space, I would not have taken this route, but I got a great deal on the second one, so I stayed the course.

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It’s Computex week, and that means there is a lot of PC news to take in right now.

Nvidia has announced RTX Spark, its Apple silicon competitor for notebooks and small desktops. This puts Nvidia in the same market as Qualcomm building Arm chips for PCs. Here’s Sean Hollister:

“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.

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I think the most interesting company in the personal computer space may be Framework, the small company dedicated to making repairable and upgradeable notebooks and desktops. It launched its first laptop — named the Framework Laptop 13 — in 2021 and you can still replace and upgrade components in it five years later. It started with an 11th-gen Intel Core processor, but now can run up to AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. A bunch of other things have been added as well, including support for Wi-Fi 7, a 2.8K display, more robust keyboard, and more. All of that is on top of being able to replace the SSD, battery, and RAM in just a few minutes.

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Myke Hurley, reflecting on Apple’s 50th birthday:

It’s getting close to 20 years since I decided that what I wanted most in my life was to be a technology podcaster, and that the thing I wanted to talk about more than anything was Apple. Through many attempts, and many homes, I eventually reached the point where this could be the way I make a living.

I launched my business on a Mac. For many years, I ran it using my iPad Pro, and all the while I’ve used my iPhone for everything in between. But for me, it’s not just about using these products — my business has also depended on Apple making them. What I create is about them.

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S.M. Oliva writes an amazing blog named Computer Chronicles Revisited, a site dedicated to reviewing episodes of the seminal television show.

(This article covering an episode that includes a look at A/UX is a great example.)

The host of Computer Chronicles passed away at the end of the year. Here’s a bit from Oliva’s post in honor of him:

This second incarnation of Computer Chronicles would be, as [Stewart] Cheifet later put it, less of a “televised computer user group meeting” and more closely related to the long-running PBS public affairs program Washington Week in Review. Cheifet himself would now serve as the host of a pre-recorded program, which would feature a combination of product demonstrations, interviews with industry officials, and remote segments.

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If you live in America and have a garage, you probably know the name Chamberlain. They dominate the garage door market with their two consumer brands, Chamberlain and LiftMaster. (They own a bunch of related companies, too.)

If you live in America and have a garage and want smart home control of your garage door, you probably already know that Chamberlain is pretty hostile to folks using its openers with HomeKit and other smart home ecosystems.

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There is drama brewing in the world of Pebble, the back-from-the-dead smartwatch. To understand what’s going on now, we need start in the past.

Pebble was a Kickstarter hit way back in 2012. The smartwatch was a true glimpse of the future, but the company didn’t last. In December 2016, Fitbit bought Pebble for ( reportedly) less than $40 million.

Fitbit kept the backend of Pebble running through June 2018, as reported by Lauren Goode at The Verge:

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John Buck’s story about uncovering the folks behind the original TIFF format is delightful. It’s shocking that history from the 1990s is already being lost.

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I recently upgraded my mouse to the new Logitech MX Master 4 and have been really happy with it.

For years, I used the old Logitech Performance MX, long after it was discontinued. After my last backup copy of it died, I moved to the Logitech MX Master 3S. It was great, and the 4 builds atop it with some nice new features. After a few days, here are some thoughts:

• Using a Logitech mouse over Bluetooth, without a dongle, is pretty great. It’s nice to get a USB port back.
• The 4 weighs less weighs more than the 3S, but it feels even easier so slide around.
• The new materials are fine. Previous Logitech mice had a tendency to get a little sticky over time, and if the new plastic holds up better over time, I’m fine with it feeling a little less nice.
• I pretty quickly turned the haptic feedback off.

In the past, the Logi Options software came with lot of stuff I didn’t want to use (including some poorly-implemented AI features), but it’s easier to turn things off now. I used it to set my mouse’s buttons up this way:

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Bad news today for old-school bloggers:

After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.

Please note that after this date, you will no longer be able to access or export any blog content.

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