Category: General Tech

Synology to Require Synology-Branded Drives in Some Products ⇢

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Kevin Purdy, writing at Ars Technica:

Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its “Plus” tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.

“Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems,” a Synology representative told Ars by email. “Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues.”

Without these drives, some features will be disabled, including volume-wide deduplication and hard drive lifespan analysis.

Casey Liss:

Synology were kind enough to send me a filled, 8-bay network attached storage device back in 2013. Within a couple months I was in love. Having infinite storage available really changes how you think about your digital life. While a Synology is not for most people, it’s 10000% for people like me. I would not and did not stop talking about them. I’ve personally sold countless number of Synology units by my enthusiasm alone.

This week, things finally changed, officially. Synology will be restricting features for those who do not use Synology-branded drives. Drives that are bog-standard enterprise hard drives, possibly with some custom firmware in them.

Why? For more revenue.

Corruption is Winning

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On Friday’s episode of The Vergecast, there was an exchange that really caught my attention. David Pierce mentioned the photos of all the tech CEOs at Trump’s inauguration in January, to which Nilay Patel replied:

The thing that kills me at that is the expectation they had going into that photo was corruption. Right? Tim Cook is going to personally donate a million dollars to Trump’s library and that will take the DOJ case away from Apple. Naked corruption. That is a nakedly corrupt thought.

That’s fine in the sense that a lot of people believe the government is corrupt, and so Trump being even more corrupt does not offend them. But it’s not fine in the sense that like even when we were covering the Google case today, people on Bluesky were replying to me being like, “they’ll just buy him off.” What? That means that the system is collapsed. Like you don’t believe in it anymore. And maybe you didn’t before, but the level to which we have accepted that just naked corruption is how this works is a little more dangerous than I think people are giving it credit for.

If you believe that Google can be like, ah, screw it, write them a check and it’ll go away. Maybe you don’t think that’s right, but you think that is possible, it’s gone. You have to not believe that’s possible. You have to actually hold everybody to account and say, actually, that’s corruption.

If you give into nihilism that the corruption is already won, you’ve just given in. You should not feel helpless; you should feel outraged that the expectation of that photograph was corruption.

I am sure if we were to poll the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, they would say that they are just trying to find ways to work with this administration. With Trump, that means money. That collection of dudes doesn’t like to think pay-for-play is a corrupting force, but it is.

None of this is new — just look at the army of paid lobbyists who make a living charging these companies a zillion dollars a year — but seeing it so nakedly (as Patel put it) is sobering. Tech CEOs may think they are doing what’s in the best interest of their companies and shareholders, but their actions do the rest of us — and the country — a disservice. I like to think that this keeps some of them up at night.

They may be able to get what they want out of Trump (for now, at least) by writing checks, “opening” a factory and putting on a show, and working the phones, but the leopards are coming for their faces eventually.

That Feeling When the Makers of Your Favorite Thunderbolt Dock Publish Some LLM Nonsense in a Press Release and You Miss When Products Could Just Be Products, Without AI ⇢

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I recently linked to CalDigit’s line of new Thunderbolt 5 docks with excitement. Then, my buddy Jim Metzendorf sent me a link to this press release about the products. Just soak this in:

CalDigit’s new Element 5, is more than just a next-gen connectivity device—it’s a performance backbone built for the future of AI. With three fully-featured downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports and up to 120 Gbps of bandwidth, the Element 5 enables local developers and researchers to run large language models (LLMs) like Llama, Mistral, and Phi-2 at full speed, entirely offline.

Ehhhh…

Running quantized or full-precision models locally requires GPU horsepower—and the Element 5 delivers by enabling external GPU (eGPU) connectivity at full PCIe Gen 4 speeds. Whether you’re pairing a MacBook Pro with a high-end RTX 4090 in an enclosure, or distributing compute across multiple eGPUs, the Element 5’s three Thunderbolt 5 ports give you the freedom to scale.

This is particularly useful for local LLM inference, where token-per-second performance can double or triple with the right GPU pipeline in place. With Thunderbolt 5’s rock-solid throughput, model loading and execution remain fluid and responsive.

A couple of things here:

  1. Apple silicon Macs do not support eGPUs.
  2. Intel Macs that included this feature only supported AMD GPUs, so that RTX 4090 isn’t going to do you any good.

They go on:

Modern LLMs aren’t light. Models like Mistral-7B or fine-tuned Llama derivatives often require tens of gigabytes just to load into memory, not including embeddings, vector databases, or training datasets. The Element 5 supports Thunderbolt-connected NVMe SSDs that provide read/write speeds exceeding 3,000 MB/s, making it ideal for:

  • Storing and loading models quickly
  • Streaming large training or inference datasets
  • Running multiple AI tools without storage lag

🤷‍♂️

CalDigit Announces Thunderbolt 5 Docks ⇢

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I’ve been using a CalDigit TS4 on my desk for years, allowing me to plug in my entire setup with just one cable going to my MacBook Pro. It has never given me any trouble, and is well worth the price in my book.

Now there’s a set of new docks from CalDigit, using Thunderbolt 5. Here’s a bit from the company’s press release:

The TS5 is a docking station built around pure connectivity. Its 15 ports are packed full of essential ports. The four powerful 80Gb/s Thunderbolt 5 ports allow users to expand and evolve their workflows like never before, and the 120Gb/s Bandwidth Boost feature allows users to connect bandwidth hungry displays with ease.

The TS5 Plus not only features an outstanding 20 ports, it is a docking station featuring many innovations. This includes the fact that the TS5 Plus is the first Thunderbolt dock to feature dual 10Gb/s USB controllers. While traditional docks share a single 10Gb/s USB controller for all of the USB ports on the dock, the TS5 Plus has two controllers, allowing for increased USB bandwidth. It is also the first Thunderbolt 5 dock to include 10 Gigabit Ethernet for connecting to powerful 10GbE networks.

The Plus is going to be $500 when it goes on sale at the end of the month, while the regular TS5 will be $370 and ship in May or June. I’m not looking to upgrade my setup, but dang, do these look cool:

Pebble is Back and Orders are Open ⇢

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Eric Migicovsky’s new company has two watches available for pre-order. The $149 Core 2 Duo features a 1.2″ black/white e-paper screen, while the Core Time 2 has a 1.5″ 64 color e-paper screen and runs $225. The former is set to ship this summer, with the latter coming at the end of the year.

The checkout page includes this text:

I understand that these watches will work with iPhones. But I realize Apple restricts and degrades functionality of 3rd party smartwatches. Because of this, I do not expect these watches to have the same features as Apple Watch. Read this blog post if you’d like to learn more.

Turns Out, You Can’t Spell ‘Humane AI Pin’ Without HP ⇢

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Jay Peters, writing at The Verge:

Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today.

AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will “no longer connect to Humane’s servers.” As a result, AI Pin features will “no longer include calling, messaging, AI queries / responses, or cloud access.” Humane is also encouraging users to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their Pins before they are permanently deleted at that shutdown time.

After the shutdown, offline features like “battery level” will still work, Humane says, but “any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access” will not.

If you bought a pin in the last 90 days, you can get a refund. If not, you will soon have a paperweight.

For its $116 million, HP is getting “key AI capabilities from Humane, including their AI-powered platform Cosmos, highly skilled technical talent, and intellectual property with more than 300 patents and patent applications,” according to a press release.

As John Gruber reminded everyone, Humane has been trying to sell itself for nine months, and was looking for a price between $750 million and $1 billion.

Pebble Poised for Comeback ⇢

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David Pierce, with some news that is going to make some folks very excited. Here he is, writing about Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky:

He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.

To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.

The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old.

My UniFi Experience, Thus Far

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After years of waiting, AT&T Fiber finally became available on my side of the street,1 giving me access to sweet, sweet gigabit speed both to and from the Internet. This became the impetus for me to replace most of my home network.

I was using a set of pretty old eero base stations, back from when they were a Relay sponsor years ago. They were great, but I had a recurring issue with the entire network would drop to 100 MBps, despite my switches being gigabit-capable. This was annoying on my previous Comcast connection, but simply not tenable on fiber. After talking to several friends, I opted to dive into the UniFi universe.

My initial order looked something like this:

It was the access points I was most excited about, as WiFi 7 would prove to be a huge upgrade in speed for the wireless clients.

Everything arrived in just a couple of days2 and setup was super easy. It shows that a bunch of folks at Unifi used to work at Apple. Sadly, the problems started almost immediately. It seems that for some people, the U7 line of access points are troublesome when it comes to IoT devices and even some Apple gear. For me, this showed up with our Apple Watches, which would drop off the Wi-Fi and not reconnect without a full reboot. This led to Watches that wouldn’t communicate with our iPhones and spin their radios up so hard that battery life was a true disaster.

From my hours of reading up on this issue, it doesn’t seem to affect everyone, so perhaps I was just unlucky. It means that my WiFi 7 dreams were dashed, and the U7 Pros were swapped out for a set of U6 Mesh access points. Since putting those in, things have been flawless. I’m very happy with the coverage provided by the access points, and it seems like the U7 line just isn’t ready for prime time.

Here’s how things look now:

Network Layout

As you can see, I have two main switches. One is in the house, and the other is at the end of a long run of weatherproof CAT-6 out to my office. Everything runs back to one of those two switches, via CAT-6 in the walls of my office, or through the attic of the house. If you can run networking cable where you live, it’s worth the time and effort.

There are two much smaller wired USW Flex Mini (the gigabit version of this thing) switches in play as well — one is on the workbench in my office, and the other is in the entertainment cabinet, providing a wired connection to our Apple TV and a Mac mini I keep around for a few oddball tasks. These switches are powered via POE, which is really cool.

Of course, there are loads of products sold under the UniFi brand, including cameras, locks, and network attached storage devices. I am curious about the cameras in particular, and may swap out my Ring cameras for them in the future, but that would require some Ethernet runs to some pretty terrible places around the outside of my house. We’ll see if I tackle that project in the future, but for now, I’m pretty happy with my network.

  1. My neighborhood was built in the early 1950s, and our utilities come in overhead from the back of our lots. Directly behind my house is a large public concrete drainage ditch. The utility company has a right of way on both sides of the ditch, so there’s a strip of land between the back of my backyard and the ditch that isn’t really mine. It is there that the closest utility poles are located. When AT&T first rolled out fiber in our area years ago, they didn’t run it down my side of the street, and I assume that was to avoid all the nonsense that comes along with the ditch. We have a new fiber company coming to town, and maybe that is what finally got AT&T to finish out their install, adding service to a whole bunch of addresses in the same situation mine was in. Whatever happened, I was psyched to get the call that I could finally ditch my old Comcast Business Class connection that was slower and much more expensive than the 1 GBps fiber I am now enjoying. ↩
  2. UniFi gear ships from here in Memphis, which makes it super quick to my house. The company’s founder, Robert Pera, is a big name around here. ↩