Recently, a few friends mentioned to me how much they love winter. "I wish Taiwan was colder," they said when I told them about the -12°C arctic blast coming up. Or, "Winter is the best!" As I'm writing this blog entry and preparing to rant about the Chicago winter, I'm reminded of the second coldest place I've ever been: Lapland. Winter there _was_ amazing. I remember it was -15°C, yet being outside almost didn't even feel cold. I remember laying in the snow, and it was so quiet it was deafening. No, winter in Chicago is not like that at all. The first thing I dislike about winter in Chicago is how dry it is. According to [some sources](https://www.hvac.com/faq/recommended-humidity-level-home/), ideal indoor humidity flucuates according to outdoor temperatures. But, even at -30°C, the ideal indoor humidity is 15%. Take a look now at the humidity in my apartment, with 0°C outdoor temperatures.

A few weeks ago I built a computer for the first time. I thought about buying a new computer for around a year already, because my old one was constantly slow and laggy. For some background, I bought my previous computer on February 8, 2011 because my Acer laptop just couldn't keep up with the times. This was my Acer laptop: 

A few months ago, I wrote about [setting up an OpenVPN server on Windows](https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/40). I was mainly using this to VNC to my workstation, and I noticed some pretty poor performance occasionally. It wasn't that the connection speed was slow -- it was actually dropping the connection almost every minute or so. At first, I decided that it was the WiFi network I was on. Maybe there was congestion. Or maybe OpenVPN on Windows is just bad. After some research, I found that the problem may have been an incorrect MTU ([maximum transmission unit](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_transmission_unit)). According to Sonassi's [knowledge base](https://www.sonassi.com/help/troubleshooting/setting-correct-mtu-for-openvpn), symptoms of incorrect MTU include:

I recently acquired the [Amazfit Bip](https://en.amazfit.com/bip.html) "smart" watch. It is a solid improvement over the Mi Band 3, but there are many quirks that remind you that you're using a ~$70 device rather than a real smart watch. 

A few years (!) ago, I wrote about using [accessing your files from anywhere](https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/15) using a custom DDNS setup. In the 2 years I've been in Chicago so far, my entire apartment building has shared one IP address. That meant my custom DDNS solution couldn't work anymore, and so I looked into other ways I could access my files from anywhere. I couldn't find any. There are things like [ngrok](https://ngrok.com/) that can expose local servers through tunnels, but that wouldn't work for my on-demand use case where I'd remotely turn on my computer to access files through SMB.