Sony flagship smartphones have always been quite premium, so it’s interesting how adding the “Premium” into the model name makes the latest Xperia device different. For starters, the new Xperia XZ Premium is the world’s first smartphone with a 4K HDR screen. It’s also really shiny. But of course there’s also a lot more to claim the premium flagship title….
Tyre punctures can be rather inconvenient to drivers, even if not dangerous if it happens as a blowout at highway speeds. Most other times, tyre punctures have not been a huge problem for me. But in the most recent incident, I was lucky and thankful to have a Tyre Pressure Monitoring System alert me to the problem. I installed a…
An important piece in the puzzle when you try to build your own desktop PC is the motherboard. It’s a key component that connects other critical parts of a PC. Different motherboards are suited for different purposes, so choosing one requires careful consideration. When I built my NAS PC, I eventually elected to go with the ASRock B250M Pro4 motherboard….
We’re all very familiar with the ubiquitous USB flash drive, or thumb drive. It’s a convenient way to copy files around. But there could be other use cases for them. Some people, like myself, use them as a boot drive replacement, instead of using a hard disk drive. For this purpose, this SanDisk Ultra Fit Flash Drive is excellent. If…
About two years ago, I wrote about Mediocre Engineering, Failed Management, in reference to SMRT’ s breakdowns. I was wrong. While it’s clear their management has been a failure, it’s beginning to emerge that their engineering isn’t doing that much better either. If I were to use favourite words from Donald Trump, they would be labelled an “absolute disaster”. I…
For the most part, most people are happy with a single all-in-one wireless broadband router for their home. Some of us, however, recognise the need for range extenders or dedicated wireless access points. There aren’t as many of these devices in the market, so I was quite happy to come across this TP-Link AP500, a dedicated AC1900 wireless access point….
For many people who build their own PCs, the choice of casing is an important consideration. It’s not just a case. You may have seen those really fanciful gamer PC casings. Those aren’t for me. I like something completely functional, useable, and easily manageable, while yet exuding a simple, nondescript, and pleasant design. Meet the Fractal Design Define R5. For comparison,…
With its dual rear camera setup, the first from ASUS, the ZenFone Zoom S is clearly focused on improving photography performance. It also boasts extreme low-light camera capabilities, and a 5,000 mAh capacity battery yet still encased in a slim, svelte, body, the ZenFone Zoom S looks to be scoring points in all the important areas. The ZenFone Zoom S…
Most users don’t think too much when they need a network switch for their home network. In fact, most of them just make do with the LAN ports on their broadband router. I needed something more complicated, a managed network switch with VLAN support in particular, and I found a very affordable one. It’s the TP-Link TL-SG108E Easy Smart Switch….
A brief outage happened on my website this afternoon. While applying some package updates that didn’t happen automatically on the Linux server hosting the WordPress blog, the upgrade broke, and then Apache httpd server subsequently refused to start. Not too much to worry, actually, I am a seasoned Linux user who should be able to fix this quickly. Except that…