Whenever we arrive at a hotel, holiday apartment, or rental property, one of the first things I unpack is the travel router. I connect it to whatever internet connection is available — hotel Wi-Fi, an Ethernet jack, or, if necessary, a 4G modem.

A couple of minutes later, all of our devices are online without me having to configure every single one.

The reason is simple: the router provides the same Wi-Fi network my devices already know from home. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, Apple TV, and other devices connect automatically.

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Taking Your Own Wi-Fi With You

I usually carry an Apple TV in the same bag as the router. At the hotel, I simply plug it into the TV via HDMI, and it immediately connects to our own Wi-Fi.

No setting up the hotel Wi-Fi on the Apple TV, no logging into Netflix or other streaming services on some unfamiliar smart TV, and no wondering afterwards whether I remembered to sign out everywhere.

Turn on the TV, start the Apple TV, and that’s it.

It becomes even more useful with devices that simply do not work well with hotel Wi-Fi networks. Baby monitors, Wi-Fi cameras, IoT devices, and similar hardware often cannot deal with captive portals — those login pages where you first have to enter your room number, surname, or accept terms and conditions.

For these devices, the hotel Wi-Fi effectively does not exist. They simply see the Wi-Fi network they already know.

An Extra Layer of Security

Another important benefit for me is isolation from the host network.

Our devices are not connected directly to the hotel, apartment, or public Wi-Fi. Our own router sits in between, providing its own firewall and NAT.

On top of that, I tunnel the traffic through an encrypted VPN connection back to my home network.

From the hotel network’s perspective, it mainly sees the travel router. The individual devices behind it and the traffic they generate are largely hidden. The operator of the local Wi-Fi cannot simply inspect which websites we visit or what data we transfer. What they primarily see is an encrypted connection between the travel router and my home network.

The best part is that nobody in the family has to think about it.

No “remember to turn on your VPN.” No VPN profile that needs to be configured on every device. No difference between a phone, tablet, Apple TV, or Wi-Fi camera.

Anything connected to our travel Wi-Fi automatically takes the secure route back home.

Your Home Network, Wherever You Are

There is another major advantage: I can access local services at home from anywhere.

My NAS, servers, surveillance system, and other on-premises services are available almost as if I were sitting at home on my own Wi-Fi.

I do not have to expose individual services directly to the internet or manually establish separate VPN connections on every device.

In a way, the entire network travels with us.

Couldn’t You Just Use WireGuard?

Of course.

On a laptop, smartphone, or tablet, you can install a WireGuard client and establish a VPN connection back home.

But for me, that only solves part of the problem.

First, there are devices such as streaming boxes, cameras, and various IoT devices where running a dedicated VPN client is either impossible or unnecessarily complicated.

Second, you then have to manage the VPN connection on every individual device. Especially when travelling and constantly switching between mobile data, hotel Wi-Fi, and other networks, that can become annoying. Always-on VPN connections can also increase battery consumption and occasionally behave unpredictably on unfamiliar networks.

With a travel router, all of this happens in one central place.

And Then There Are Hotel Wi-Fi Networks…

Some hotels make things even more inconvenient with captive portals, short session durations, or access that needs to be re-authorized every few hours.

This is another situation where the router is extremely convenient.

Instead of five, ten, or even more individual devices having to deal with the hotel network, exactly one device does: the travel router.

As long as the router remains connected, our own Wi-Fi stays available. I return to the hotel room and everything simply continues to work.

So Why Use a Travel Router?

For me, it is not really about carrying yet another router around.

It is about taking my own network with me.

Connect the router once to whatever internet connection is available, and everything behind it works the way I am used to:

My family’s devices connect automatically. Apple TV and IoT devices work without being reconfigured. Our devices are isolated from the foreign network. Traffic can be securely tunneled back home. And my own local services remain accessible as if I were connected to my home Wi-Fi.

That is why a UniFi Travel Router has become a standard part of our travel setup.

Internet at the destination goes in. Your home Wi-Fi comes out.

Der Beitrag What Do You Actually Need a UniFi Travel Router For? erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.

We apply the changes and now call up this new link.
The window should now open in dark mode.

I now recommend adjusting the light font colours once under File/Settings/Colors so that they are easier to read. I have highlighted all fonts in black.

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First of all TAKE A BACKUP BEFOREHAND if possible at this time.

Now go into your database.
Search for tables which data includes the old domain name.

For example search for http://development.mydomain.com if that was the subdomain or domain your site was initially being build up on.

Now exchange all these entries against the new domain. Make sure to also check if you will need to change the http to https for example change this to https://myproductivedomain.com.

Quick tip:

The SQL statement to do so per identified table is:

UPDATE tablename SET columnname = REPLACE(columnname,”http://development.mydomain.com“,”https://myproductivedomain.com“)

BUT TAKE A BACKUP BEFOREHAND!

Things highlighted must be adapted to your own domains, tables, columns of course.

Der Beitrag ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS on WordPress after Go Live + Domain change erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.

SSDs are faster and more energy efficient than traditional spinning and mechanical hard drives.  

To save power, I bought a cheap SSD with 1 terabyte of storage. Due to the reviews especially about the durability, I chose a Crucial BX500 CT1000BX500SSD1 1TB * from Crucial.

The conversion of the SSD was very simple: shut down the device, remove the old hard drive, install the new hard drive, boot the device again.

The good thing: After changing the HDD, I only had to import my latest backup and everything was up and running again. I didn’t have to do any configuration again. Only, the surveillance videos previously stored on the old hard drive were logically gone.

* All links marked with an asterisk are Amazon affiliate links. We receive a percentage of purchases made through them. Nevertheless, our recommendations are honest and sincere.

Der Beitrag Equip Cloud Key Gen 2 Plus with SSD and save energy erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.

Carlinkit’s box costs around 100€ at the time of this article’s publication. For this amount, it promises to make any wired CarPlay “wireless” – which means an enormous gain in convenience for the user, since the phone does not have to be connected to the car via cable before use, but connects wirelessly to the car’s multimedia system as soon as the journey begins.

Test results

We tested the small box in 4 different vehicles:

• 2020 Mercedes E-Class
• 2017 Mini Clubman
• 2020 Land Rover Defender
• Motorhome with retrofitted Sony moniceiver

In our test, the box immediately worked without any problems in the aforementioned vehicles.

Depending on which vehicle we connected the box to, the box apparently recognized the vehicle because the box changed its Bluetooth name depending on which vehicle was connected.

Keine Produkte gefunden.

Only with the retrofitted Sony receiver the box did not work. We can only assume that it is because the box could not find the car manufacturer “Sony” in its built-in database and therefore could not pass the data of the iPhone in a suitable format to the car radio.

Link quality

The connection is established reliably and quickly directly when the vehicles are started. Playback of music, for example, starts immediately. In comparison with a 2020 BMW 7 Series, the Wireless CarPlay of the “Carlinkit” box is in no way inferior to the original BMW CarPlay. 

Once the connection is established, it has always been stable in our tests.

Usability

In our eyes, the usability is robust, although not 100% user-friendly due to partly missing translations. This is not noticeable in everyday use. Every user should be able to connect the box with the car and their own iPhone with the box without needing instructions.

However, the box has an integrated update mechanism. Presumably, the box downloads new vehicle data to ensure compatibility with new vehicles or changed vehicle software. If your iPhone is connected to the WLAN of the “Carlinkit” box, calling up the IP address of the box via a web interface allows you to update the box. The interface is in English, but sometimes a confirmation button has Chinese characters. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as you can guess what the buttons are for in the context of the update.

You may have to start the update process several times in a row, because the updates have to be performed one after the other (incrementally) until the final version.

The update process itself is cleverly designed: To ensure that the iPhone still reaches the update server via the Internet despite the WLAN connection to the “Carlinkit” box, the iPhone is automatically set to data-saving mode when it connects to the box, which automatically routes the consumer traffic to the Internet via the iPhone’s cellular interface. This works amazingly well and reliably and is not even implemented this well by some well-known manufacturers of other IoT products like cameras or smart home devices. These implemented processes and mechanisms already speak for a carefully constructed device.

Conclusion:

If you already have Wired CarPlay in your car, you have a very good chance of retrofitting real “Wireless CarPlay” with the box from “Carlinkit”. At €100, this retrofit is not nearly as expensive as retrofitting the entire vehicle at the manufacturer, if at all possible.

The box itself and the software running on it is robust and should not overwhelm tech-savvy users.

We can recommend this device and we would buy it again.

Der Beitrag Review: Making wired Apple CarPlay wireless with Carlinkit erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.

Ihre Daten werden erst beim Abspielen des Youtube-Videos an den Dienst übermittelt. Your data will only be transmitted to the service when you play the Youtube video.

In my experience, the first device that finds cables and pipes really reliable and accurate in the wall. I have used various cheap cable finders in the past and the result was usually very mediocre. It is different with the Bosch D-Tect 120 (Amazon Affiliate Link). This finds really comfortable lines and pipes in walls.

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Der Beitrag A cable finder that really works: Bosch D-Tect 120 erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.

However, if you want to upload your video in the best possible quality, you should avoid quality-reducing encoding altogether.

No matter how you upload your video, Youtube will never say “Oh, that’s a great codec, I’ll keep that”. Because Youtube will always compress your video down as much as possible, so that it uses less memory in the data center and generates less traffic when you watch it.

But wait: Youtube itself says that you should upload all files in H.264 and MP4 format? Yes, exactly, because Youtube doesn’t see the point in accepting thousands of billions of cat videos in lossless format every day. That would cost Youtube a lot of money.

Fact is, it makes absolutely no sense to compress your video before uploading it. Youtube will do it again anyway and any compression process done in series will result in lower quality.

If there is a reason to compress before uploading, it is to shorten the upload time. If you have enough time, you should rather upload a video in HQ422 or ProRes or DNxHR that corresponds to the source in favor of the quality. Youtube can handle it – without problems and quality loss.

Therefore, do not change the bitrate, resolution or codec. Youtube will do what it wants with it later anyway.

Attention: If you upload videos with a higher resolution than 1080p, Youtube will automatically switch to the VP9 codec for all versions of the video, including 1080p. With this VP9 codec, better results are achieved for all resolutions. Therefore, it even makes sense to upscale 1080p video to 4K first and then upload it.

Der Beitrag The Youtube H.264 / mp4 lie. Forget the export madness! erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.

Solution:

Go to Synology and open the VPN server. Open the settings menu for L2TP/IPSec VPN.

Remove the checkmark from “Enable SHA2-256 compatible mode (96 bit)”.

Der Beitrag Solved: iPhone and Mac do not connect to Synology L2TP/IPSec VPN: The L2TP-VPN server did not respond erschien zuerst auf Pixelfriedhof.