Evolving Passwords: Transitioning from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords

You can tell 2025 is shaping up to be a year of change for me—first transitioning from Quicken Desktop to Simplifi, and now moving from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords. Our family’s password management journey started over a decade ago. Back then, my wife and I used a password-protected Excel spreadsheet to store all our credentials. While rudimentary by today’s standards, …

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From Quicken Desktop to Simplifi: My Migration Experience

I recently made the leap from Quicken Desktop to Quicken’s Simplifi app. Transitioning from a traditional desktop-based tool to a sleek, web-based app has been a BIG change. While both products are under the Quicken brand, there isn’t a built-in migration path between them. This means starting fresh, which can be daunting for longtime Quicken Desktop users. Why I Switched …

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Create an Airplay 2 Player

Our house came with outdoor speakers installed but there wasn’t a way to play music on those because there wasn’t any audio receiver connected. These are passive speakers so would require an amplifier (or full blown audio receiver) to power them. Buying a receive is an overkill so I was looking for amps. While looking for amps, wanted to get …

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Plex hardware encoding with Intel Arc A380

UPDATE: The instructions in the original post were for Ubuntu 22.04. If you already have Ubuntu 24.04, you can skip all this as long as you can see your device under /dev, it should show something like /dev/renderD2128. I do recommend installing the compute packages from Intel’s repository # Install the Intel graphics GPG public key wget -qO – https://repositories.intel.com/gpu/intel-graphics.key …

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New SSDs not showing correct Serial# in Proxmox Disk Manager

I faced a weird issue. I added 5x identical brand new consumer grade SSDs to my DL380P, and inside Proxmox disk manager, they all showed up as having Serial#s as 0s, see below. Upon looking further, it appeared that Proxmox is using ID_SERIAL from udevadm. The correct serial number is shown in ID_SCSI_SERIAL. I looked around on Proxmox forums, and …

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Homebridge install

After moving to our new house recently, I decided to go all Apple Homekit for my smart devices. Our previous homes were all Z-wave and Zigbee. In the first house we turned into a smart home, it was Wink, then came SmartThings. There was a bit of Google Nest. In our next house, we used SmartThings, and later Home Assistant, …

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© 2025 Vikram Chauhan