Month: August 2026

Gigabit FOMO

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After my recent internet upgrades I ended up with a new dilemma. A good dilemma, but still.

For a while now I have been running Tailscale on all my devices. It handles all my internal services and lets me connect to everything on my home network from anywhere without having to think about it. For privacy on top of that I added the Mullvad VPN exit nodes that Tailscale offers as an add-on. Five dollars a month, integrated straight into the Tailscale network, pick a city and go. No toggling anything off, no conflicts with my internal services. It has been a great setup.

Then I upgraded my home internet to gigabit. And suddenly I started noticing something. On my phone, without the VPN, I was pulling 800 to 900 megabit down. With the VPN on, more like 500. And something in my brain did not like that.

I kept telling myself it was probably in my head. But I wanted to actually know for sure.

So I did some research and thought it through properly. And the conclusion was pretty straightforward. On a phone, do I actually need gigabit download speeds? Am I going to notice the difference between those numbers when loading a webpage? The answer is no. At those speeds the bottleneck is never my connection. It is the server on the other end, or the screen, or just how fast things can render. The gigabit matters when I am downloading something substantial on my computer or my NAS. On a phone or tablet, even streaming HD video, it simply does not matter.

What I had was not a performance problem. It was a psychological one. I upgraded to gigabit, I could see a faster number without the VPN, and some part of my brain decided I was being shortchanged even though in practice I was not missing anything.

The rational answer is obvious. Keep the VPN on. It is more private, more secure, and the speed difference is not something I will ever notice in real use. I just needed to actually verify that before I could accept it.

VPN stays on.

AI For the Mundane Stuff…

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I have been using AI for increasingly mundane things I always meant to do but never actually got around to. Most recently, a mystery Mac DMG file.

I had a Mac DMG file. About eight gigs. Password protected. I have no idea why I password protected it. I knew roughly what was in it, a big archive of installer packages going back years, but I could not get in because the password I thought it was was not working.

I have been saving installers since back when software did not just update itself over the internet and you actually needed to hold onto major versions. Over time the archive grew across different Mac architectures. PowerPC stuff, then x86 and Universal binaries, and now arm64. So there is a lot in there going back a long time.

I put Claude on the case. I gave it my best guesses at what the password might be, because I did not want it going through every possible combination until the end of time, and it set up a cracking tool locally on my MacBook Air and let it run with those hints. It got in.

So now I had all this data, plus a bunch of other old archives, and the problem was figuring out what was what. File dates only get you so far. Some of it was obvious, certain versions of Microsoft Office are a dead giveaway for the era and architecture. But a lot of it was not.

This matters because I have two PowerPC Macs I picked up vintage that I actually want to use, and I have been thinking about picking up an older Intel Mac for similar reasons. Half of it is just because it is cool to have. The other half is that occasionally I do want to run some old software. So getting the right installer on the right machine is not a trivial question.

A few prompts later, Claude had written a set of scripts that parsed through everything, sorted it by architecture, and organised it all into the right folders. A few back and forth sessions where it asked me questions and I confirmed things, and it had a pretty solid result.

Then I went a step further. I had it size and create read only DMG images for each architecture, correctly sized so the PowerPC stuff would fit on a DVD if I want to burn one, or on a USB key I can move to one of the older machines. Right file systems, right sizes, the lot. About 100 gigs of stuff in total so it took a while to churn through, but my actual involvement was maybe 20 to 30 minutes of back and forth.

I had wanted to do this for years. Total elapsed time was maybe three hours, almost all of it the computer doing the work.

Now it is all backed up, the images are ready, and whenever I get around to spinning up those old machines I can actually do it. Which might not be for a while. But at least now I can.

Grogu, the Blanket, and the Accusations

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This happened at Christmas. It is almost August when I got around to writing. Some stories take a while to get to

For Christmas, M bought me a throw blanket. Presumably me. Possibly the cat.

The idea was to have something to leave on top of the comforter so that when Grogu comes to bed, I can give him something to settle into without sacrificing half the duvet. He is a Devon Rex, which means he runs cold and treats any available warmth like a personal entitlement. In warmer months I would just toss the comforter over him and he would curl up in it and stay there. In winter that is not really an option unless I want to freeze.

The blanket solves that. He has something warm to nest in, I keep the comforter, everyone wins.

Except there is context here.

For a while now, A has had her own fuzzy blanket that she wraps him up in at bedtime. He sleeps in her bed, she crawls up around him, and neither of them seems to mind at all. It has been a whole thing. She is genuinely good at snuggling him and he clearly appreciates it.

When the new blanket arrived, A’s immediate reaction was that I was stealing her cat. She was kidding. Mostly. Or that is what I keep telling myself.

What she glossed over entirely was that Grogu would come to us regardless. The blanket was not a power move. I was just making it more comfortable for him, which is apparently all I do. M would say I am a pushover for the cat. She is not wrong.

This week he has been doing his usual routine. Sitting on someone’s lap downstairs, then migrating to the radiator around midnight because apparently it functions as his personal sauna, and then eventually making his way upstairs.

To our bed.

To the new blanket.

Except he is not picking me. He is picking M. Every time. I get none of the cat and all of the blame.

A is furious at me for a situation entirely of her own making, about a cat who is not even choosing me anyway.

Not that it matters. I am not keeping score.

My Watch Is All I Need (For Payments)

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When metal credit cards first came out, I thought they were cool. They were novel. They looked premium. They were basically indestructible compared to a regular plastic card. And at the time, only a handful of cards even had them, so there was something a bit different about having one.

I was a little vain about it. Fine.

But I have the opposite opinion now. And the reason is pretty simple. I do not really carry a wallet anymore. I have one, but it lives in my bag as emergency disaster recovery. We are talking a card with a decent amount of credit for emergencies if something happens to the phone or watch, and a card or two for cash withdrawals.

In the UK I almost never touch a physical card anyway. My phone and my watch handle everything. Apple Pay on both. Tap and go. For years now the only reason I pull out a card at all is to get cash from an ATM, and even that is rare.

We did an entire trip to France last year without once pulling out a physical card or touching cash. The whole thing. Did not miss it.

So when a subscription I pay for decides the premium perk they are going to give me is a metal card, I am not impressed. I am just thinking about how two metal cards in that slim wallet means I can’t actually use it as a backup the one time I actually need it.

Physical card use is down. Cash use is down. The trajectory is pretty obvious.

I have left the house with just my watch and been completely fine. Done it more than once. It works.

Going fully watch-only as a daily habit is probably a stretch. But the wallet is already basically an afterthought. Metal cards are so 2018. Current and future Scott is all in on the watch and phone combo.