Grateful to share that Techlogist.net has reached its 5th anniversary milestone, with hopes for many more years to come!

If you need to benchmark the major components of your Windows or Mac OS computer, then novabench can help you. It will run 11 tests that span from CPU, GPU, HDD and RAM, that will show actual performance in usable units such as GFLOPS or MB/s. It also has a built in stress test.

The tool is free and available to download here.

If you need a more detailed battery health report from your Macbook, then the application coconutBattery is the correct tool. It will show the battery health, cycle count and even the temperature. This tool also allows for iPhone or iPad battery tests.

The application is free and available here.

Most modern Apple computers come with non-removable internal drives, because they are directly soldered to the motherboard. Hence, SMART Utility, a GUI tool for querying and verifying SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data becomes very important, as its showing the number of hours, GB/s written to the drive, and it’s overall health. This is important because HDDs and SSDs have a limited amount of writes.

This application has free version available for free here.

If you need a all-in-one terminal based package manager for your Mac, then Homebrew is the right tool for the job. This free tool will allow you to quickly install, update, remove or automate any package in any Apple computer without having sudo permissions.

Its free, and super easy to install and use. The setup instructions are available here.

Your computer suddenly has random crashes? Want to sell your computer and ensure that the RAM is working as it should? Want to know more about computer diagnostics?

MemTest86 is a self-booting USB tool that allows testing with detailed reports of almost every x86 based CPU and RAM type in the market. The tool supports all Intel (Apple computers included) and AMD processor architectures. It requires creating a bootable USB pen-drive, but its worth it.

Its free and available for download here.

Did you realize that your computer or server ran out of disk space and you don’t know where those GBs were used?

To get your precious disc space back you can use a disc space analyzer like TreeSize.

TreeSize analyzes internal and external storage devices, all types of drives (SSD and HDD), does not require any accounts or network connection to run, generates graphics of storage use, if ran with full administrator privileges it will analyze system files and deleted them on demand.

The application has both paid and free versions, portable and installable packages, that you can compare and download here.

After updating my Intel based MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, I noticed an immediate increase in CPU temperatures, fans at full blast, and even some applications started freezing. When I attempted to identify the root causes, the Activity Monitor and Terminal crashed at every attempt.

I did not have any unbacked up data in the MacBook, therefore I decided to downgrade it to the previous operating system version, macOS Ventura, but the laptop kept looping into the “macOS Recovery over the internet”, and displaying the error code -1008B when it finished loading after 10 minutes or so.

This error means that the device, according to Apple’s website, has an activation lock because its connected to an iCloud / Find My account, and removing it from there usually resolves the issue, but this time it only went away when the boot keyboard shortcut to clear the PRAM and NVRAM was used.

Hope this helps with the issue.

Recently I bought my self a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of fast DDR4 memory to add to my home lab, with the goal of using it as platform to run a 2 or 3 virtual machines by installing a compatible hypervisor.

The little green credit card sized computer does not come with a case, power supply or onboard storage by default, hence a few extra items need to be added to the shopping list.

Before buying anything, and extensively reading about how to maximize the performance, I attained that an external USB 3.0 storage device would increase the IO speed and lifespan of the storage, the CPU requires an active cooler to keep the computer free of thermal throttle under light overclocking, a good power supply makes it run better, and that a fast microSD card is required for the initial firmware updates and configurations.

After searching for case recommendations across the web and reading a pile of reviews, I decided to purchase the 52PI aluminum NAS case, because it came with a M.2 2280 SATA SSD disk to USB 3.0 adapter, double copper heat pipe cooling tower with a PWM fan, and it had a small footprint.

The box comes with all the manuals, thermal pads and tools necessary to the build the case. No soldering is required to connect the fan to the RaspberryPi’s IO pins.

The manual has all the instructions, plus, detailed pictures that aid in the assembly process and software setup.

The final product, in my opinion, is esthetically pleasing . The fan has a RGB led that cannot be turned off, yet its very quiet and keeps the Raspberry super cool and stable. I read somewhere that the fan can be upgraded to a near silent one from Noctua that has the same dimensions and voltage rating of the one that comes with the kit.

I personally recommend adding an additional external on-off switch for the power supply to make hard resets easier.

If you need to understand how your website behaves when accessed from different locations and get some detailed reports, tools.pingdomm.com can give give that analysis quickly and for free, with recommendations. The shareable or downloadable report shows your load time, page size, content and request size by content type.

URL: tools.pingdom.com

If you need a lightweight IP address management, phpIPAM is an open-source, web based and self-hosted application.

With this tool you can manage both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, manage sub-nets, VLANs and NAT, search for available IPs, device type and rack management.

The application is free and available to download here.

To connect a Windows computer to a WiFi network using the command-prompt, you can use the netsh command.

Open the Command Prompt and type the following command to view the available wireless networks:

Locate the network you want to connect to, and note its SSID, authentication and encryption methods. You may need ask for the password.

Copy the network.xml file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad) , enter the SSID name (replace %my_wifi_network_name%), authentication (replace %Authentication_type%), encryption (replace %Encryption_type%) and keyMaterial (replace %my_wifi_password%). Save it as a .xml file.

Type the following command to add the network profile:

To connect to your newly added profile type the command:

If all went well you should now be connected. Open your network browser and check if you can reach your favorite website.