Welcome!
Welcome to Ethan's personal blog, dah.li/a or dahlia. Here, I'll talk about a wide variety of topics that I'm passionate about, including (but not limited to) useful software I find, smartphones, cool products and gadgets, and whatever I want to discuss at any given moment. Thanks for stopping by— I hope you enjoy some of the stuff that I write about!
SFO to DVC on public transit
The San Francisco Bay Area isn’t exactly known for its outstanding public transit—and people are pretty much right about that. By no means is it underrated—it’s a mess of different systems and the poophole that is BART. That being said, it’s better than I first imagined, and I decided to make the journey from SFO […]
U.S. State Highway Shields Ranked
Every state has highways— they’re an important piece of infrastructure that allow millions of people to travel places via car or bus every day. There’s no doubt they’re important, which is why there are so many of them all over the country, divided into multiple categories: Interstate highways, which are denoted by the iconic red-and-blue […]
The Building of Campanula
Campanula is a Pomodoro timer application I built over the timespan of a few months starting in late January 2022. The idea of creating a new and better Pomodoro timer app came to me while I was trying to find a competent solution that could accomplish the goal of being decent at its purported job. […]
The Apple Watch SE: Crazy Value
The Apple Watch SE is a budget smartwatch released by Apple alongside the flagship Apple Watch Series 6 to serve as a more affordable alternative. Released in September 2020, it was the first of its kind to be released since the Apple Watch’s debut “Series 0” was released in 2015. Currently, it is being sold […]
A Proposed Replacement for Our Messy Calendar
In 46 BC, Roman dictator Julius Caesar proposed the idea of the Julian Calendar, a new calendar standard to build on top of the previously existing Roman Calendar, which had 10 months of 30 to 31 days and had been the standard in Rome for many years. Caesar’s proposal for a new calendar looked very […]
Notion is a multifaceted all-in-one workspace & organization tool that works well for personal notes, collaborative projects, journals, and much more. As a tool that’s been around for many years, it has gathered a large following around many communities, being comparable to a Swiss Army Knife in the productivity world. Its freemium model combined with […]
Emmert Wolf: Clinging to Life With But A Quote
Backstory On October 10th, around 10:36 PM PDT, I was writing the 7300th word of my Notion article when I decided that I needed to use a saying in my writing that, at the time, I was not sure existed. I thought to myself, Well, this sounds like a popular thought. Surely this must have […]
Buying used electronics is something that can be a bit of a complex task for a lot of people, being that, generally, electronics are be more complicated than other items. It’s hard to tell how long something will last after you buy it, and sometimes what condition it even is at the moment if not […]
Excel IF Formula: How to Use It, Nesting, and Applications
The IF formula found in spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice, is one of the basic ways to test conditions and display values based on whether that value is true or false. The IF keyword is pretty fundamental for conditional functions that work differently based on values, or for mass calculating […]
COVID-19 and Its Momentous Impact on Technology
COVID-19, the deadly disease also known as the Coronavirus Disease 2019, emerged in late December 2019 out of Wuhan, China, spreading throughout every country on the planet, infecting millions of people and killing those who were unlucky, underprivileged, and/or careless. As of June 23rd, 2021, 178.5 million cases have been reported many worldwide, with 2.1% […]
Windows 11: Predictions, Thoughts, and The Legacy of Windows
“Windows 11” is what many dub the next iteration of the Microsoft Windows operating system after its predecessor and current latest version, Windows 10, released in 2015. Since this tweet from the Windows Twitter account and this tweet from Microsoft CPO Panos Panay surfaced, many have theorized about the rebranding of Windows following the demise […]
ClickMonitorDDC: Easily Control Your Monitor Settings, Volume & More
ClickMonitorDDC is a small system tray program created by a fellow named Martin “mapini” with the purpose of making it fast and convenient to change monitor brightness and system volume levels, seemingly based on other brightness/contrast/volume changing utilities like ddcutil. As of June 8th, 2021, and likely since before November 7, 2020, ClickMonitorDDC’s website is […]
Toastify: Customizable Global Hotkeys and Now Playing Card
Toastify by aleab is a little program with simple functionality that can greatly increase the quality of life of Spotify users. It adds support for global hotkeys and a “Toast” that can display the currently playing song. Currently, Toastify is only available on Windows, although as long as you have a Windows device, the media […]
TickTick is a multi-platform to-do list app released in 2017 by California-based Appest, Inc. It is a powerful app with a plethora of features mostly surrounding setting reminders in a better way than other apps and websites and the traditional way of pen and paper. It is currently available on Windows, Android, iOS, watchOS, macOS, […]
Logitech MX Master 2S: Absolute Steal for $50
The Logitech MX Master 2S was released in 2017 as a part of Logitech’s high-end “MX Master” series- the second in line succeeding 2015’s MX Master and preceding 2019’s MX Master 3. The MX Master line of mice consists of the most expensive and top-of-the-line of mice that have been released by Logitech. All three […]
f.lux – Powerful Scheduled Blue Light Filter and Effects Suite
f.lux, or “flux”, is a little program created originally by Michael and Lorna Herf with the intention to combat that blue tinge that comes with screens on electronic devices. Most operating systems, whether that be Windows, Android, or iOS, have a “night light” (or something with a similar name) mode that adds a yellow filter […]
The Current State of Android Phones – End of an Era?
Google’s Android OS, the most widely used operating system in the world, is known for its open-ness, its inexpensiveness, and to some people, its inferiority to its main competitor, Apple’s iOS. The big debate between the two has gone on for many, many years now, with hardcore fans from both sides defending their phone of […]
The Samsung Galaxy A01: Surprisingly Economical, Delightfully Stylish, and $40
The Samsung Galaxy A01 is a mobile phone released by Samsung Electronics in early 2020. It features an octa-core Snapdragon 439, with four cores at 1.95 GHz, and another four at 1.45 GHz, along with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage. I got mine from TracFone via Amazon, meaning it was locked […]
My Homelab Experience Part 1: My HPE ProLiant Hardware
while ago I wanted to see how much computing power I could get out of a small pile of cash I had- specifically $150. I looked on eBay to look for salvaged server components that were decommissioned from datacenters and ended up on eBay, possibly for a multitude of reasons.
WhatPulse: Fun Statistics About Your Computer User Input!
WhatPulse is a fun little program I found earlier this week that tracks statistics about how you use your computer in terms of input- your mouse and keyboard habits, to be frank. You can see data concerning what keys you press in a table or heatmap format as well as where on your monitor you […]
Hello! Welcome to my personal blog!
This is a test post for my personal blog. I’ll be posting stuff from time to time about various things. Hopefully you will enjoy. Maybe you won’t. I don’t know. We’ll see. This is literaiiy signing off! 👋