Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

A good note if you are doing this for your parents or friend. It’s a jungle, there are a zillion websites, but to cut to the chase: Once this is done you can go to medicare.gov and sign up for a plan, there are zillion different ones, but the most feature rich is Medicare Advantage,…

More notes on this. As of August, a big change is that Verizon/Warp now has more than 100 roaming partners. Still less than T-mobile/light speed and at&t/dark star but much better. It’s really quite a win. I’ll be sad when some gigantic conglomerate buys US Mobile out. But in the mean time, it’s been working…

There’s a lot written now about how watch 26 and 26.1 cause incredible battery drain. This has happened to me on both my Series 7 and Ultra version 1. At one point, the ultra lasted just 4 hours. They both have 85% battery performance left, and I tried all the usual steps like stopping background…

I got the Hagibis early this year and it has rocked. It is a Thunderbolt 4 drive and with the very fast Samsung 990 Pro, it can do 3GBps read and write easily. Saturating the 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4. It was about $120, but now you can get it for $60 from Aliexpress so the progress…

OK, we normally do day hikes or short camping trips, but we’ve never done a long five-day hike from 4-5km up (yes, that’s 16,000 feet in altitude). learned a lot about what it takes to get up there, and here are some tips if you are similarly inclined, but here are the big lessons. Listen…

OK, here is one frustrating thing: if you are trying to do a nice video (for friends) and want to get a nice soundtrack, the copy protection with Apple Music makes it impossible to add a track for your movie in Final Cut Pro. Looking at what you actually get, if you ask for “Download…

Well, this is a frustrating one. You boot up your Mac, and suddenly ALL yourthird-party menu bar icons have vanished. 1Password? Gone. AlDente? Disappeared.MonitorControl? Nowhere to be found. The apps are running (you can see them in Activity Monitor), but the menu bar is acting like they don’t exist. The documentation on this is scattered…

It is actually harder than you think with these smart devices to make things work exactly the way you want. Someday, it will be as easy as “Always display the time when I walk by my Next thermostat” But in the meantime, you need to know how to use Farsight with the Nest 3rd Generation…

Well for a variety of reasons, all of our ultra cool agents, we have a nearly 6,000 line single YAML file that is our base configuration. So it is nearly impossible to figure out what is wrong because it is not incorrect syntax, but the tool (TNE Compass if you must know) is very picky…

This is a really useful command. Previously, we’ve been using “op read” to get items from 1Password. Man is it slow, even though you are logged into 1Password on the client, it takes a about a second for each of say 25 API keys to get pulled. Why 25 do you say? Well, it’s the…

We just had our main SSL certificate “die” on Netlify. I’m not sure why but a TXT record got truncated. This reminded me I’ve had another long standing issue with tongfamily.com where every so often I would get an invalid SSL certificate. Well, I tried gemini-cli to figure this out and it led me to…

Another great session with Bill Price talking about Silent Sufferers and the future of Customer-Managed Relationships (which is way more accurate than CRM or Customer Service)

This was more of a test podcast than anything else, where we are now streaming on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, and Twitch with rebroadcast on LinkedIn, YouTube, and the Podcast world. But Seb does a good job talking about what it’s like for someone in college now with Generative AI everywhere

As we are building out various AI Agent Assistants for an entire enterprise at tne.ai, one of the crazy things is how to mimic voices. We have one that is part of our CMO Chief Marketing Officer roles, which does this. Given a set of input (in this case, the 5,000 or some posts on…