Today I went to EB Games in Scarborough Town Centre to trade in my old PS5 for the new PS5 Slim. After applying the trade-in credits, I only had to pay $16 for a brand-new console — definitely a great deal.
The whole process was quick and easy. There was no line-up, and everything was done in about 15 minutes. I told the staff that my old PS5 was the original 2020 launch model, only to find out it was actually from 2021 and a 1100 model, not the 1000 series. The new PS5 Slim I got is the 2100 model, made in Vietnam.
I don’t really play much PS5, even during the pandemic, but it’s still nice to have one in the living room. At this point, my nephew probably plays my PS5 more than I do. I really miss the old PSP days.
I switched to Freedom Mobile yesterday from Fido, at the cost of a hard credit check. I am satisfied so far. I don’t see any issues with the signals in Toronto/Scarborough.
I will pay $35 for 50GB. In contrast, I paid $43 for 35GB with Fido. Most importantly, Freedom Mobile gives me free US roaming, which means that I do not need to worry about paying expensive roaming fees ($12 per day at Fido), just to trigger the roaming by mistake.
It is not Black Friday yet. However, the BestBuy worker gave me $100 BestBuy gift card to compensate for the $45 activation fee and said I could get a price match should there be a better deal on the actual Black Friday.
When I woke up this morning I got an email from Jetpack Monitoring saying my site was not responsive. Checking the internet, I learned that there was a fire alarm in my website’s data centre, in LA. The fire alarm forced the power to be shut down.
Around 12:00PM EST, my site is back running. First such incident in 8 years since I started my first personal website.
I have been driving to the Agincourt Go station and taking the Go train downtown recently, I have had a good experience overall except for the parking lot space availability. It takes me only five minutes to reach the Agincourt Go station but forever to find a parking spot in the mornings. I don’t commute every day so I don’t want to reserve a parking spot. TTCs are not very reliable so I don’t want to take TTC buses to the Go station either.
So I started an experiment – how early shall I be there to have a parking spot? I started with 9 AM – no space; 8:30 AM – no space; 8:00 AM – no space; 7:30 AM – yes there’s plenty of space.
Therefore, I came to the conclusion as follows:
You need to be at Agincourt go train station around 7:30 AM to grab a parking spot – that’s said, you should aim for the 7:30 AM go.
But Friday is special, even at 10:00 AM you could find a reasonable number of empty parking spots.
News were saying Presto would be coming to Apple Wallet in July this year. Today I saw this search result in google titled “Presto in Apple Wallet”. They even have a picture to promote it.
But when I clicked, it said 404 not found. Guess they are testing something. Hopefully it’s a good signal that Presto support will come to Apple Wallet very soon!
I stopped using Zoho Mail last night after being a Zoho customer for nearly six years, and migrated to iCloud+ custom domain email. Zoho mail is affordable and had been providing me with a stable email hosting solution. I started with the free plan and the moved to paid subscription which only cost me ~15 canadian dollars.
Why I moved to iCloud+ custom domain email is that it’s basically free to me because I am subscribing to iCloud+. It saves me 15 bucks a year. I don’t recall if Zoho has a cap for the number of domain aliases, but iCloud+ custom domain does, limiting the number of domain aliases to Five Domains in my case (not sure if a higher iCloud+ plan gives more aliases, I am with 2TB plan). As for the email address aliases, I haven’t reached the cap yet.
I am not running a business, so some features by Zoho are not necessary. For the domains that exceed the maximum number of domain aliases, I used CloudFlare email routing to forward the emails automatically to my now iCloud emails (I have many email aliases for receiving different types of emails but I don’t use them all to send, thus forwarding is sufficient).
I updated to the iOS 18 beta (iPhone 15 Pro) when it was announced early this week. I am very impressed by the new features of this update! It’s all about customizability.
Table of Contents
iOS 18’s Customizable control center
The customizable control centre of iOS 18
I was an Android phone user until December 2022. That’s being said, I am a pretty new iPhone user. I have been used to the iPhone and the Apple Ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes miss the customizability of Androids.
This iOS18 gives me back some customizability I used to have – customizing the control centre. And I’d like to say it’s even better because I can customize the size of each “Control” (you see how large the Media Control is?).
Customizable Home
Now we can decide which two icons at the bottom of the screen.
And it’s integrated into the wallpaper settings. That’s being said, you can have different sets of “controls” for different wallpapers.
Here, I have “QR code scanner” and “Camera” icons for “Do Not Disturb” focus mode.
More choices of Charge Limit
Before iOS 18 we can only limit the charging up to 80%. But now with iOS 18, we have much more choices. Better for your battery health!
With a charge limit of 95%, the charging will stop at 95%.
FaceId protected apps
Now your iPhone is safer in iOS 18, because you can now use Face Id to protect apps.
You can either make an app “Require Face ID” or “Hide and Require Face ID”.
The first option makes it required to pass Face ID every time someone tries to open an app on your phone. The notifications will only have a preview in this case.
The second option hides the apps in a “Hidden” folders in the App Library. It won’t show up in the search results as well.
Screenshot
Redesigned Gallery
iOS 18 comes with a re-designed gallery app. It looks surprisingly different than the old one. We can customize the layout of the library.
But where is the Hidden Folder?
What am I still looking for as a previous Android user?
Focus mode
Focus mode! When I used my Galaxy S20, I could turn on Focus Mode, and all muted notifications would be indeed “muted” – I wouldn’t be able to see those notifications in the “Notification Center”. But using my iPhone, every time when I open the notification center (by scrolling down), I see the notifications from the muted applications.
Fonts
Using my Android phones, I could change the fonts of my phones, globally. I don’t think iOS 18 supports this feature.
Smart Lock
I have been missing this feature since early 2022 when I made the shift to the Apple Ecosystem. I hope that Apple can consider this feature in the near feature.
Issues/Bugs
So far, I have seen the following lists of issues/bugs:
I can not access Screen Time in Settings. Every time I click Screen Time from Settings, Settings crashes, and I am redirected to the homepage.
When I use the larger icons (which is also a new feature), the icon of the Contacts app will be blank. This issue only exists in dark mode.
Sometimes I experience a slow refresh rate, but that’s not very often and I think it’s okay considering it’s the first beta of iOS 18.
