Xodium Dot Net

A short one, because it's exactly as it says on the tin:  As of iOS 26.4, Apple has seemingly fixed the Music app's search function so that it no longer defaults to Apple Music. In fact, in my case, they've done more than fix it, they've  improved  it. Now if you have Apple Music shut off in settings (Settings > Apps > Music) there's only  one  search tab remaining: Your Library. Radio? Gone. I don't use Radio ever, so this is a net improvement for me. But because of this, Music now defaults to Your Library. Which for someone who doesn't really do streaming (and on the rare case that I do, YouTube Music is what I use), this is amazing. There are still little keyholes through which Apple Music pokes through (like the tiles in search, which are annoyingly still there without a subscription), but given this has been a problem since iOS 18.0?  A win's a win. Given Apple totally doesn't have to give a toss about the few of us still using Music for l...

So, I am very much anti-AI. I hate it, I think it is no more than some techbro-fueled plagiarism machine that only exists because techbros don't want to pay people what their worth and think this wonderful black box of misinformation they created will replace everyone and do everything and will throw unfathomable amounts of money and natural resources at it to realize that goal.   It is peak enshittification, at least as the AI bros present it.    However,  the thing with being against something is being informed and not irrational about it, and yes, I  do  see some uses in AI tech (that don't align with what the AI bros and boosters are pushing on us without our consent). To try and be more nuanced in my opinion, I have a tier list in my brain that I use to classify generative AI stuff and whether it's something I'm going to give someone shit for, or if I'll let them pass and not think less of them.   This is that tier list, at least as best as I can ...

Apple did a thing I never thought they'd do and they made a budget MacBook and called it the Neo. (Hey, AlphaSmart fans...)   Personally? I think it's pretty neat for the target market. It's $600 USD, $700 to double the storage and give you Touch ID. $100 less if you buy them via education discount.   It's a pretty cheap way to get a MacBook that gets the job done. People have been sneering at the use of an iPhone chip in these when I think people forget just how powerful the A-series processors have become. The A18 Pro in the Neo compares very favorably to the M1 in the MacBook Air just judging on Geekbench 6 scores:   A18 Pro (iPhone 16 Pro) 3445 Single/8624 Multi 32574 Metal Score   M1 (MacBook Air, 2020) 2347 Single/8342 Multi 33148 Metal Score   This is an A18 Pro  in an iPhone,  mind you. In a MacBook with greater thermal headroom? It'll probably perform even better. Going by these numbers the only thing the A18 really trails on is GPU performanc...

This is one of those things that might be useful to someone out there so: This is how I, personally, reinstall Windows 98 on my retro boxes. I should note a few things: I am doing this on machines with USB. Substitute accordingly to your machine's capabilities. I'm also doing this on machines that are pretty minmaxed, ones that probably shouldn't run 98 but do because I'm absolutely nuts (like running 98 on very much XP machines). I also have network cards in my machines. I also use SATA SSDs for this. Let's begin: 1. Prep the drive If you're using something small and not comically large like me, you can probably skip all this and  just  use fdisk and format. I usually run 128GB SSDs and fdisk tends to lose it on drives larger than 32GB, so I opt to prep the drive in another OS entirely. Do not, and I repeat,  DO NOT  use gparted for this; for some reason 98 does not like whatever gparted does to the drive. My weapon of choice here is a tool called guiformat by ...

(Click the picture to go to the full photo album.) On this Valentine's Day weekend, I was actually able to exhibit at VCF SoCal 2026 with the help of a few good friends. Normally, I can't do events like these outside of my home turf because hotel and travel costs quickly add up and make it untenable. Even cheap hotel options have gotten expensive, and fuel costs are also plenty expensive. This year, though, two things lined up and the rest kinda fell into place. The first was an awesome person, RevisionY2K, stepping in to offer to cover the table fees for SoCal. While these weren't expensive and plenty reasonable, it was still money that couldn't be used for other costs. The second was longtime friend AK having moved to SoCal and offering up his living room for me to crash at for the duration of the weekend. He usually stays at my house for West so this was a fun turning of the tables. His house was roughly 30mi away from Anaheim, which is certainly closer than my house...

At the end of 2025, I wrote a big post about how I was just...flummoxed trying to get a client's business network up and running and to get some IoT equipment they were using up and running too.    This finally came somewhat to a head today, and I'm pleased to report I finally--with the help of a suggestion from a friend--figured it out.   Said friend had a suggestion to give Wireshark a try, to see if I could spot any rogue DHCP servers on the network. I kept this in mind for a time when I could go back to do more troubleshooting, and that day finally came. A weekend where no one would be using any of the network, so I could pull the whole thing offline and do whatever I wanted.    I went in fully expecting to rip the whole thing asunder and do it all over. After all, this was someone else's mess I was cleaning up, and I had no idea what was going on or why certain things were set the way they were. But then I remembered the Wireshark tip. I installed it on my...