I was looking for a small portable monitor, the size of a laptop screen with a HDMI input. Most big brands offer sizes of 22″ and larger, but during the COVID crisis I needed something smaller for a streaming setup in my spare room. This WHOLEV model seemed to fit my needs (I got the 12″ version). 

The unit is as described, featuring four inputs at the back:

• HDMI
• VGA
• RCA
• and BNC 😃

The latter is of interest to professional broadcast users, for whom BNC is a standard composite video route). There’s also a USB port at the back, but I’ve not worked out what its use is (possibly software updates). We find an on/off switch at the back, as well as menu control options. Thankfully there’s a small remote control in the box with which switching inputs and working the menu is much easier.

I love Stardew Valley, and it’s super exciting that save games can be transferred between multiple platforms. It’s not difficult if you know how, but sometimes it’s the little things where you get stuck – so before I forget again, here’s what I’ve been able to transfer and how. I have the game on PC (from Steam) and from the Apple App Store on multiple iOS devices. I’ve also got it working on my Mac, and I can transfer my game onto all these platforms.

The game saves themsevles are text files inside a folder. We need the whole folder, which is named something like YourName_123456789. Even if you have two save games with the name name, the number will be different. To transfer a game, simply copy the whole folder in question onto the target platform.

Here’s where you find the game save files:

Twitch allows for very convenient exports of past broadcasts and highlights to your connected YouTube channel: In the Video Producer, click on the little three-dot icon next to a video, the select Export. Moments later the video, including its title and description should be on YouTube. It’s rad!

Sadly though, doing this will introduce rather strange characters caused by Twitch’s use of Markdown. Links for example are converted into Markdown, and extraneous hashes and such things are littered around the description as a result. The same goes for apostrophes and other special characters, they’re all destroyed with ampersands and semicolons. YouTube at its end sees this as plain text and leaves things as they are – much to my dismay.

The good news is, I’ve found a way to avoid this issue:

Instead of using this export dialogue, choose to Edit your video instead. This will bring up a different context dialogue, letting you change the thumbnail, description and title. As you would expect, you can edit the description without Markdown conversion, so no schlnoz characters will show up. That’s nice!

Now select the Export option from there, and your video will show up on YouTube WITHOUT those characters. Catastrophe averted 🙂

It’s hard to believe, but there’s a regular no-frills non-WiFI MP3 player available in this day and age! Can you believe it? When I read about this I wanted to take a closer look at the MAHDI M9 Plus MP3 player gadget. Here are my thoughts on this thing.

It’s very small and lightweight, about the size of an iPod Nano, which has been discontinued since 2017. If you’ve been looking for a replacement for yours, or always wanted one, then this device might be a good fit for you.

I don’t often use Bookmarks in Firefox, but when I do, I’m used to those opening in new tabs rather than get rid of what I’m currently browsing. Perhaps that worked in the nineties, but I wanted a different default behaviour.

Turns out we can make that happen! Let me show you how to do it.

If you’re like me and do a lot of writing on the move, you’ve probably often wished for a super compact travel keyboard that can go anywhere with you. While I’ve tried many, they’re often just toys and not real keyboards. Using those is often less efficient than just using an on-creep keyboard. 

Then I discovered this Jelly Comb Travel Keyboard. It folds in half in the centre, it’s super small when folded, has a rugged leather feel to the outside and it’s extremely light. When folded out, it reveals a full-sized QUERTY keyboard with all the additional function keys of its desktop counterpart. Let me tell you more about my experiences.

I bough this little device for my wife’s Acer Chromebook. It’s her work laptop, and she uses it with an external monitor. The Chromebook only has one USB 3 port and she frequently needs more than that, for anything from memory card readers to other external devices.

She has to connect and disconnect about three cables to the Chromebook every day. This is tiresome and those laptop ports only last so long before they fail when used too often. I was interested in a tidy solution to the whole mess of cables and found this neat Yemo USB-C Hub, Model YM-11.

My friend Jason bought this camera for his apartment, to keep an eye on his dog Benny when he’s at work in the office. It was so impressive I had to have one myself: it’s the Bammax BMBM01 Smart Camera. This thing is way more than a security camera. It’s a two-way walkie talkie, great as a baby or pet monitor for real time interaction, or to see what’s in your kitchen cupboard. Here are my impressions.