Category: Tools

I have an Asus RT-AC68U router at home. I’ve previously used the build-in update checker together with a notification script that ran on the router itself. Recently I noticed that I hadn’t got any update notifications in a long time, one of the downsides of silent failures. This is my custom code that looks for updates. Read →

Having switched from Windows to Mac quite recently, there is one application in particular that I’m missing – Notepad++. After trying Notes and Stickes, Brackets and a bunch of others, I had to rethink what I was actually using Notepad++ for and which characteristics I was appreciating the most. Read →

I recently bought a new machine, a MacBook Pro 16", and this is my initial configuration. I'm documenting this for my future self so I have something to cherry-pick from if I will ever configure a new Mac from scratch. Some of these things might not be relevant in future versions of macOS or for future versions of myself, so I don't see a point in automating it. Read →

This is a story about my personal computer (PC) experience, from the 1990’s up to my new love for a six year old laptop. In November 2019 my wife bought a new laptop (MacBook Air) and I took over the old one. It’s a 2013 MacBook Pro that I have borrowed a few times for debugging web pages on iOS, but beyond that I don’t have much macOS experience. I saw the opportunity to take it and learn macOS for real for the first time. Read →

Even though there is an app for my Asus RT-AC68U router with the default firmware, it hasn’t worked that well for me and I wanted reliable firmware update notifications. I found that this has been done by others, but still, there are a few steps to go through, so I’m documenting them here. This works for several other Asus router models as well, see the list of supported routers. Installing Custom Firmware The first step I took was to install the custom firmware Asuswrt-Merlin. Read →