MI 10T Pro – What you should know!!!

I am recording this on the device itself so we can get a better idea of what I want to share here.

First, the biggest drawback of the new MI phones…Not just the 10T, but also the other MI models.

The default MI Dialer and Messages applications have been replaced by the Google ones. This is a shocker for any MI phone user since the Google Dialer and Messaging applications are pathetic by comparison.

Although there are alternate Dialling and Messaging applications, nothing I have seen so far comes close to being as good as the MI applications.

Okay, with that negative point out of the way, the rest is all good!

The screen is a high-quality LCD with a refresh rate of 144Hz. As a person who is into photography, I prefer the high-quality LCD to an AMOLED screen since the LCD has truer colours.

While most people would talk about the blacks on an AMOLED screen and the small area of an always-on display, just the blacks do not do a whole lot for overall colours. On the lighter side, this is a phone, not a watch that I might want an always-on display.

In short, you can actually use this screen to check images for actual colours in case your monitor lacks sRGB colour gamut support. Of course, we have might have better colour screens on the AMOLED side sometime, but, that is not the case so far…

Talking of photography, I will go through the default Camera and Gallery applications that come with this device and my recommendations to get the best out of the camera. Let us take a brief look at the camera settings first, and then the variety of modes this application offers.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/39zdfCO

Since the normal auto mode of the camera seems to be manipulating the image from the sensor, it is smaller and not as good as the one you can get from the Pro mode. My recommendation would be to use the Pro mode in full auto mode as a substitute for the normal camera/video modes for better results. #Xiaomi #MI #MI10T #Photography

Cloud Storage – What is the best option?

I will not get into any arcane storage options of unknown companies offering lifetime schemes. In fact, I would advise avoiding all such for a variety of reasons.

Let’s look at the top 3 names that offer us reliable cloud storage for normal users.

1. Apple iCloud

2. Google Drive

3. Microsoft OneDrive

Although there are some more names like DropBox, Amazon etc. we will ignore those for now…

Speed up Adobe Lightroom Classic

This is a little known technique that I wanted to share, but, kept forgetting 🙂

Basically, it’s not just Lightroom, this technique works for all disk/file intensive applications on the Mac and since Windows also indexes file, this would work on Windows as well.

Let’s take a brief look at how to speed up such applications on the Mac…

WD My Passport SSD vs Sandisk Extreme SSD

A brief look at the WD My Passport SSD and a comparison with the Sandisk Extreme SSD.

Link to WD My Passport SSD on Amazon: https://amzn.to/39KY21W

#SSD #Sandisk #WDMyPassport #Mac

SanDisk Extreme SSD – A Brief Look!

This SSD is good enough for all practical purposes excepting for editing 4k, or higher, video.

In practice, you will not notice the difference between the 4 times faster internal SSD on the MacBook Pro vs this Sandisk Extreme SSD.

The SSD link at Amazon: https://amzn.to/39Qw6Kl

Type C to Type A Adapter at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3mQZX9a

#SandDisk #SSD #Mac #MacBook

How to rename “EFI Boot” to “Windows” on the Mac

This is an irritant for some people like me who use multiple drives and partitions. Since all Windows and/or Linux boot partitions show up as “efi boot” on the Mac startup, it is desirable to change the name on startup so we can easily figure out which partition is which.

For some, it is merely the aesthetic value, but, in either case, being able to change the EFI boot name is generally desirable.

In this video, we will see how to do this on the Mac for installers and then how to change the same once we are booted into Windows on the Mac.

Generally, since we would format the Windows partition to NTFS, we have to use a small workaround in Windows to change the boot name for the Mac.

In this video, we will see how to go about the name change…

BEBONCOOL 4-Port USB3.0 Hub for Macs & PCs

After having gone through quite a few hubs for my new iMac, I finally settled on this one.

It has an additional input via a micro-USB for power which allows me to drive my external high capacity hard disk drives which would not be possible in a non-powered hub.

I used one of my old mobile chargers and plugged in the micro-USB power from there to this hub.

This is currently available on Amazon at the following link…https://amzn.to/32vzG83

Let’s take a look at this now…

VLC Playback Issues with WMV on Mac OS X?

I recently got some video files in the Windows WMV format and VLC on Mac OS X was not able to play these files. It’s not that VLC does not play any WMV format files, it just happens that the files I had, did not work.

Having tried Flip4Mac some time back and observed similar issues, I chose not to try it again, instead, look for some alternate solution.