DIY & Home Improvements Archives - Reflections & Explorations

Evolving Passwords: Transitioning from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords

March 8, 2025January 12, 2025 by Vik

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, it worked effectively at the time. Over time, I decided to self-host Bitwarden in my …

From Quicken Desktop to Simplifi: My Migration Experience

March 8, 2025December 31, 2024 by Vik

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 to Simplifi I’ve been a loyal user of Quicken Desktop’s Deluxe version for several years. …

Create an Airplay 2 Player

March 8, 2025July 27, 2024 by Vik

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 one that has Airplay capabilities, but unfortunately those seem very pricey. Therefore, I decided to …

Plex hardware encoding with Intel Arc A380

March 8, 2025January 7, 2024 by Vik

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 | \ sudo gpg –yes –dearmor –output /usr/share/keyrings/intel-graphics.gpg # Configure the repositories.intel.com package repository echo …

Configuring NFS Share on Ubuntu

March 8, 2025January 7, 2024 by Vik

Configuring NFS is a simple but can be a frustrating experience esp. if you are trying to export an NFS root. Here’s step by step instructions that helped me. On the server where NFS is configured, path is /storage. Let’s call this server nas. This NAS runs Ubuntu. Edit the /etc/exports file on the NAS. The IP is your network and subnet mask. The magic option is fsid=0 for NFS root. This allows the /storage …

zpool creation failing in Proxmox GUI

March 8, 2025January 1, 2024 by Vik

While trying to create a brand new zpool from Proxmox GUI, I was facing an error. This was partly solved by New SSDs not showing correct Serial# in Proxmox Disk Manager so at least in Proxmox, correct Serial#s were showing in the zpool creation screen (see below). In looking further, the by-id links are not present, and the two that are present are incorrect. The remaining work is to update udev rules so the correct …

New SSDs not showing correct Serial# in Proxmox Disk Manager

March 8, 2025January 1, 2024 by Vik

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 found that someone had reported a similar issue here: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/disk-serialnumber-in-pve-host-disk.122251/ There was a solution recommended …

Resetting password for HP V1910-48G J009A

March 8, 2025December 31, 2023 by Vik

I recently had to reset admin password for my home network switch. I had to look around on multiple forums on the internet for instructions, and was finally able to figure out how to do it. I thought of sharing the instructions in this post to help others looking to reset password on this switch. First, the ethernet cable (link) method didn’t work for me. Therefore, the only possible option was to use the serial …

Homebridge install

March 8, 2025September 25, 2023 by Vik

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, with Ring for cameras and security. Needless to say I’ve had my experiences with smart …

Samsung Odyssey G9 49″ Monitor macOS Settings

March 8, 2025February 4, 2023 by Vik

I picked up this monster size monitor a year ago. It is truly ginormous and gives me plenty of screen real estate. I had it hooked up to my MacBook and everything worked perfectly fine until I upgraded macOS to Ventura and lost the Scaling option under display settings. After that, the display was all messed up, and I spent a lot of time searching on the internet what to do here. If you landed …

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