Mechanical keyboards, mice, displays, cases, cooling, memory cards, cameras, phones, and phone systems: this is where I write about the things you plug in, take apart, and sometimes regret buying. Reviews after months or years of daily use, out-of-warranty upgrades, dubious compatibility claims, and gear from another era still earning its keep. Marketing promises, the spec sheet hedges, real use settles it.
There is an irony here I find almost delicious, and it is the only delicious thing in this whole affair. The moment my phone becomes unreadable is precisely the one Apple has spent ten years selling me: bright sunlight. Bright sunlight, then. You pull out the device to read a map, frame a photo, glance […]
For more than a decade on Sony A7R bodies, one observation has imposed itself with irritating regularity: skin tones drift towards green, and no amount of post-production correction really sets things right. This Sony green, as the photo community calls it, isn’t the whim of a Canon nostalgic. It’s a technical reality written into the colour matrix that Sony has been supplying to RAW-conversion software for years. The most paradoxical part? Sony bought Konica Minolta in 2006, inheriting along the way decades of expertise in the natural rendering of skin, a heritage Minolta had spent fifty years building, and that Sony seems to have filed away in a cupboard. While Fujifilm built its entire marketing around its Film Simulations and Canon kept flattering flesh tones by default, Sony was optimising its matrix for DxOMark test benches. Laboratory truth rather than human truth. Mathematical excellence comes at a price, and it’s your portraits that pay it.
Linky, Itron and Landis+Gyr meters equipped with a TIC output let you integrate your real-time electricity consumption data into Home Assistant. Two technical solutions face off: the ESP32-PoE-ISO with the EthTInfo shield favors the robustness of a wired Ethernet PoE link, while LiXee’s ZLinky v2 bets on simplicity with self-powered Zigbee communication. This technical guide compares the architecture, installation, budget and reliability of the two approaches to help you choose the solution suited to your home-automation setup. Whether you have one or several meters to connect, find out which method best matches your priorities between maximum performance and ease of deployment.