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The default MI Dialer and Messages applications have been replaced by the Google ones.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

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…

Windows 10 on Mac – Without BootCamp limitations!

Once upon a time, the Apple BootCamp worked as expected for the most part. In recent times though, that is no longer correct as many might already know.

There are occasions when I need to use native Windows and I would like that to be on an external SSD to be used and re-installed as and when needed.

There are 2 main issues when trying to install Windows on a Mac if you do not have a Windows system around.

1. Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad does not work
2. You need Windows to get a NTFS formatted drive

There is a lot of material on the Internet that seems to be more in the legacy domain now.

I will discuss how to create a bootable USB drive for Windows 10 on the Mac using simple tools that anyone can deal with. The bootable USB I create works fine on both my iMac and MacBook Pro since I get the keyboard working in both cases and that allows me to install the Apple BootCamp drivers and application without any external requirements.

Let us see how this can be done…

Download Windows 10 ISO from:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

Download UNetBootIn from:
https://unetbootin.github.io

Download Extramagic from:
http://extramagic.forbootcamp.org

Download the AutoUnattend.xml from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxoQk3YAeWOqJYuRTtIHQU0_dsrywKTI/view?usp=sharing

Mac OS – How to create a USB installer and downgrade

Given the fact that there are applications that are yet to be updated to be compatible with MacOS Big Sur, quite a few people saw a need to downgrade back to their older MacOS versions.

I will discuss how to create an external USB bootable drive for multiple MacOS versions and how to use this drive including on systems which have a T2 chip on them.

The Apple support links are as follows:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

The free archiver Keka can be found at:

https://www.keka.io/en

Let’s see how this works…

Mac OS – Empty the Trash/Bin Fast!

This is a little known feature on Mac OS which allows you to clear the trash extremely fast compared to the normal “Empty Trash/Bin”.

For example, if you have thousands of files left by some application, or, just want to rebuild files for any application and delete the existing ones, just emptying the trash can take quite some time.

A typical example of this, in my case, would be to delete the preview files in Lightroom or ON1 Photo RAW cache which can have thousands of files.

This is far more apparent if the data is on a HDD, external or internal, rather than a SSD.

One way around this is to use the command line and delete the files and folders using the rm command. Fortunately, the trash/bin in Mac OS has an equivalent which just deletes instead of displaying the file count and its status while emptying the trash/bin.

Let’s see how this works…