Blog

Have you ever tried to read an article on a website that is jam-packed with ads? Most of the time the overall experience will discourage you from it and you give up or will try to find similar information in a place, where you can access it more pleasantly.

I am using AdBlockers on all my browsers and hate when some websites tell me to turn it off just to read their content. They decided to block me from reading until I complied.

I understand that this is their source of income, however, browsing these websites without an adblocker enabled is a pain as hell.

The screens encouraging “support of independent writing” by displaying ads are nothing compared to the unpleasant and distracting experience of reading their website without adblocker enabled.

This kind of website that prevents me from visiting at the start is, for example, makeuseof.com.

This is crazy but true.

Thanks to Cloudflare Email Routing, I can accept and send emails in my domain, but still manage them on my ordinary Gmail account. This all is set as I wrote down in my post titled Email in your own domain with Cloudflare (and Gmail)

Over the last week, I faced an issue with emails not being delivered to my mailbox.

Firstly I thought that there was something wrong with Gmail service blocking forwarded messages. The same though had plenty of people using this service and writing their experiences all over the internet.

Just a few weeks ago I have been thinking about, what I am doing with my ageing MacBook Air with an M1 chip.

The MacBook Air Air with M1 was introduced in November 2020 but I purchased mine in July 2021, officially from Apple, but from their refurbished store.

I saved a bit on a base model and thanks to that I have been able to take 3 years of Apple Care and still meet my budget.

Despite that nothing happens along the road, so I don’t need to use this plan, I still wonder, if, after these 3 years, I will be able to buy, at least, a year more.

The device working well. I would like to have a bit more internal storage (currently got 256GB base), but apart from that everything working fine. The device is still fast and reliable. For my needs, I don’t see a reason for change.

I have been thinking about a possible upgrade when the MacBook Air is introduced with the M3 chip and that is what happens today (4th March 2024) through press release.

At the same time, Apple decided to discontinue MacBook Air with an M1 chip. Its place, in the same price range, has been offered to a 13-inch MacBook Air with an M2 chip, which is typical.

But what does that mean for users, who use MacBook Air with an M1 chip? Also, what does that mean for people, who just now decide to buy MacBook Air with an M1 chip?

Since Microsoft Edge transitioned to the Chromium engine (the same engine as Google Chrome), I encouraged Windows users to try the updated version. After all, both browsers offer similar functionality.

Microsoft Edge, when logged in with a Microsoft account, was nicely integrated within the Windows operating system, offering a seamless experience. However, I’ve noticed that for users who primarily use Android phones and rely heavily on Google Services (like Google Photos), this solution is no longer optimal.

I am quite a tech-savvy person and I know how to spot fraud, and how to protect myself from losing money to fraudsters.

To my surprise, I recently discovered 3 unauthorised transactions on one of my credit cards which is issued by Barclaycard.

Because I am using this card to pay for my balance transfer and nothing else, I have been logging into the app only once a month to pay a part of it.

Just last month, when was time to pay it, I noticed that the outstanding balance was higher than what I calculated that I needed to repay. I have looked into a statement and noticed that for the last months, from September to November, each time on the 8th, I have been charged for Amazon Prime £8.99.

The funny thing is, that I already have Amazon Prime, for years, but I am paying it annually and not from Barclaycard. I don’t have Barclaycard added to my Amazon account.

Because these transactions are not displayed on my Amazon account, I haven’t been able to sort this out with Amazon itself and need to contact Barclaycard.

Before that, I raised claims about unauthorised transactions for all three transactions.

As a precaution, I cancelled my Barclaycard and requested a new one with a new number as I thought that with a new number, no more new transactions would happen. Below I will show how wrong I were in that assumption.

If your daily digital life relies on Google Services, once you become an iPhone owner this may not change. I was a long-term Android user before I changed to the Apple ecosystem.

Even though Apple is offering their equivalent of what Google offers on Android, I never found a better alternative for storing pictures than Google Photos.

Google Photos for most of the typical users is unreplaceable due to the Storage Saver option. Thanks to that we can store all our photos and do not pay too much for the storage. At some point we will need to pay Google to store them, however as they are compressed, they consume less space than storing them in full resolution in, for example, Apple Photo Library.

The first thing that I do when setting up my iPhone is to download the Google Photos app from the App Store. This is what I recommend to my friends who switch from Android to iPhone, however, there is one thing that needs to be remembered.

After five years interspersed with the pandemic and market instability, I flew to Poland to visit my loved ones.

A lot has changed since my last visit. My children need to be connected to the world to a much greater extent than in the past. Personally, I have also become accustomed to having the Internet at hand, always where I need it.

While in England most people with Wi-Fi at home have it at quite reasonable speeds, in Poland it varies depending on where you go.