I didn’t know about this until now, but there is a feature called “back tap.“ It allows you to trigger specific actions by tappingeither two times or three times on the back of the iPhone. You can set this to zoom in or out.

This is where ChatGPT says to go:

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap.
2. Choose Double Tap or Triple Tap, then select the action you want to assign.

iOS has an accessibility feature where you can tap two times with three fingers and zoom the screen. If you hold on the second tap and upward it will zoom in a custom amount. Sliding down zooms back out. Would that work? It would be independent of all web browsers.

MakeMKV Works on Linux. I got it working with Xubuntu in proxmox.

I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore

If you have Hue bulbs, you can buy little radios that attach to your light switch (or replacement light switches) that will still operate your lights when the server is down or the network is unavailable. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.

Is there a reason to avoid Nvidia cards on Proxmox still?

You probably only need the iPad. The iPad is great for giving you access to most stuff until you get home and can do the more serious work. If you absolutely must do your work away from home, get the Macbook Pro, because iPads are great, but as you mentioned, they don’t have a desktop OS, and that’s a limiting factor.

clamxav

ClamAV has a maximum size for files that it will scan, which I believe is 20MB. I can’t tell if clamxav has the same size limit baked in, but it might! So it may not be the best solution if you have large files in your system.

First things first: Synology as a beginner NAS is perfect! It’s what I recommend to everyone that is getting started out. So good move there.

I think you should get a four-bay NAS. You don’t have to put four drives in it; you can put two drives in it and have an upgrade path for later. Plus the drives are far easier to install and remove. The processor will also be better in a four-bay NAS, which will give you more options if you want to play around with a docker container or run a VM.

To answer your questions:

1. If the NAS you choose has a USB port on it, you will be able to connect things like external hard drives, thumb drives, etc. NASes with USB3 connectors support USB 3 drives. Just be sure to use a file system that is not proprietary. So NTFS is out, but exFat is fine.
2. I have connected to volumes on the NAS and have connected the NAS to other volumes without issues. It will work fine.
3. I had two NASes sitting right next to my head in my office at ear level — probably the worst case scenario for noise. I barely noticed them. I could hear them crunching away during backups, but it wasn’t bad. I never heard a fan running — just the internal drives making their read/write noises.
4. The drives fail before the NASes do. Synology had some issues with bult-in power supplies going bad after a few years. Their modern NASes now have plugs with a power brick on the cable, which I assume was in response to this issue. It’s a lot less expensive to replace a power cable than a whole NAS! But beyond that one issue (which affected one NAS of mine), the NASes I’ve been using have lasted for … oh, 8 years now.
5. There are many choices for syncing data with your synology NAS. They provide Synology Drive, which gives you a local drop-box-like folder syncing option. They support rsync, and they provide HyperBackup, which is a block-level backup utility. You can choose a Synology shared drive as the destination for a Time Machine backup on a Mac. (I assume you can do this with Windows’ backup solution, but I’ve never personally used it.)

However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine.

Which app?

You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.

I investigated this and couldn’t find a tool to do this. Which tools have you seen that do this?

Totally unintentional. I’ll edit it.

Porkbun is sort of the darling of the self hosting community. I settled on them after doing a huge comparison of prices and features of all the different registrars available to me. Porkbun was by far the best.

Readers will be available for $99

Has anyone here used a different VR headeset who also needs reading glasses? I use readers (I had laser eye surgery, which made me need reading glasses much earlier than usual). I tried the Meta Quest 3 over the holidays and was surprised to discover that I didn’t need reading glasses to see things “up close.”

Don’t forget spatial video. A minute of spatial video is approximately 130MB. 256 GB is going to fill up fast.

Using the search bar in iPad OS to solve equations does not require access to the internet.

If you have a keyboard, press command-space. You can then enter an equation that you want to solve in the search bar. If the syntax is correct, it will give you the solution. Try this equation as an example:

(2+pi)/(3^3)

It will display this result: 0.1904293575

If you press enter and you do have internet access, then it will send the equation to Safari and execute a search in your default search engine. I’m not sure why it odes that; that doesn’t seem too useful.

Some other operations you can do in the search bar:

sqrt(n), cos(n), sin(n), tan(n), log(n), ln(n), etc.

Some other functions that I’ve used in Excel also work in the search bar, such as min(12,2)

My guess is that it supports many or all of the functions that are supported in Numbers.

With this, you should be able to quickly solve just about anything you would type into a calculator app.

I’ve used this button before. I swear it does something slightly different than saying “details” did. Like it doesn’t preserve North-up map orientation or something. Without having the old voice command, I can’t check to verify. Thank you for taking the time to highlight the button, though!

What bothers me is that Apple doesn’t document its features very completely. Here’s an example:

In CarPlay, I do a lot of navigating using Apple Maps. I discovered years ago that I could say “Details” to Siri to get the map to zoom in to allow me to see upcoming turns. I could say “overview” to get it to zoom out to show me the whole trip on the map. Very useful! I had to discover this feature by accident, though. As far as I know, there’s no button in the interface to do this, and there certainly isn’t a list of commands that Siri users can use, CarPlay or otherwise.

Even more infuriating is that this feature was removed about six months ago. Does it exist under some other spoken command? Who knows? Apple doesn’t document anything!

The same thing happened to me. I spent years changing the setting to traditional scrolling. Then, one day, my brain just flipped, and now I make registry edits to Windows to enable natural scrolling there, too. I suddenly can’t live without it.

How advanced of a calculator do you need? You can do a lot with the search bar.

Seeing people recommend nginx proxy manager, I’ve tried to set this up but never managed to get the certificates to work from letsencrypt (“internal server error” when trying to get one). When I finally got it working a while ago (I think I imported a cert), any proxy I tried to setup just sent me to the Synology login page.

I think WebStation is causing this. I just investigated my Synology NAS and discovered that the default web portal is redirecting ports 80 and 443 to the synology login portal (which lives in ports 5000 and 5001 depending on whether you use SSL or not.)

I take on a homelab or Apple ecosystem project every weekend to keep my skills sharp. What I’ve noticed after several years of doing this is that I know a whole lot more about what the homelab services can do than I do about the iPhone in my pocket. Today, for example, I forced myself to go through the Health app and enter things like medications. Pretty soon my devices were reminding me to take my medication and asking me to log what I took. Despite all the reading I do about Apple products, I didn’t realize that the app would remind me to take the medication. That’s really useful!

Another example is when I learned how to make the iPhone make white noise. Who knew that the accessibility features included that? Or that you can choose ocean waves or rain instead of the white noise? And here’s something I learned entirely by accident when trying to pay for something at the store — pressing the sleep button three times toggles the white noise feature. I don’t think that’s written down anywhere.

This is why I need some of those in-depth tutorials. They always expose you to a dozen tangentially related capabilities while you’re learning about the subject of the moment.