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home: Nest Displaying a Clock
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…
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net: UniFi VPN to Home Teleport eratic, Wireguard works
Well, we’ve had two cases where we want to access our Unifi network at home. In one case to get a Time Machine backup finished and also to access the home servers. The documentation is just terrible, so here’s a quick guide as of October 2, 2025 Teleport: Load WifiMan then login Teleport. This is…
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dev: Massive YAML file debugging
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…
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dev: Agonies of 1Password op inject
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…
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wp: The mysteries of Inmotion Hosting SSL Certificates
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…
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pod: RBT1 Rich and Bill talk about CRM, Silent Sufferers and AI
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)
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pod: RT8. Talk with Seb Suarez and the Gen Z View of AI
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
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car: Honda TPMS Reset and B1 Service
You can forget how obscure errors can be, but today we got a B1 service light and then the TPMS light turned on. I made sure the pressure was OK, but it was still on. Then I checked out the YouTube Video that said you just have to power the car and hit the TPMS…
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ai: blog: Tongfamily Prompt
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…
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gt: Grace’s May Day is Today
So proud of Grace and her latest adventure, which is rolling out today. Great piece in NW Asia Weekly. Come one come all 🙂
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net: Azure onboarding in a new country
There are a bunch of steps here, and we are just trying to remember them, so if you are moving to a new country, you will want an Azure account in that country most likely:
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net: Chase Unenroll ACH Blocking
This is a nifty feature of Chase. If you have a business, you can enroll in ACH Debit Blocking. This keeps people from sucking money out of your accounts without you looking. It’s pretty easy to start Chase.com -> Security -> Enroll in ACH Debit Block It appears on the front screen, but if you…
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net: Airbnb We’re having trouble redeeming your gift card
If you get this dreaded message, be aware that they have a time-bound limit filter; if you add too many gift cards at once, they block it, so you need to go to support and patiently get a payment specialist to unblock it. I can see why this happens. If you have fraud, then there…
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net: AARP Reward must use Safari on Mac
Well, one of the better deals right now is that from AARP (if you qualify!) you can get 5% off of gift cards on things like AirBNB. What isn’t obvious and has to be the first time it has happened for me, is that neither Chrome nor Brave on the Mac will correctly handle their…
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ai: Roo Code, Claude Code and Open WebUI Missing Manual 2025-07
Wow, what a powerful open source project, this is in the class of seemingly infinite AI Coders, but the use of “modes” (what the current hype calls Agents ), but it’s super great, although a little confusing to use, so here are some notes: Strange asdf and roo code interaction with claude OK, figure this…
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ai: Open WebUI -1 problems, more ram, $200 plans and ComfyUI URLs
OK, some miscellaneous but valuable comments in the AI journey Open WebUI model parameters redux The context length and other parameters of Open WebUI are really low, like 2K context windows. This doesn’t make any sense in the era of AI coding. Some defaults help a bit, which we’ve covered before. Like -1, but I…
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pod: RT9. Quick Test and more on Claude Deep Research
Another short test with YouTube, LinkedIn, but actually, the content is sort of interesting, how to do prompting and think of it like a programming language
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sw: Passport photo workflow redux
Every six months or so, I have to get some photos or visa photos, and it is so complicated (and who wants to pay $30 per photo). So here is the workflow that works at home:
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cell: At&T Hotspot strangeness and the magic of APN profiles and “dun”
Long story short hotspotting is great and we had great luck on light speed (T-mobile) on US mobile with Nexus 6 phones but sigh not this time: Net, net, the Android APN defaults are wrong from US Mobile at least for the Xiaomi phone. The APN profile needs to explicitly say “dun” in it or…
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edc: Setting Time on Casio Promaster C660
I know I’ve posted about this before, but with the very cool looking CITIZEN Promaster C660 ECODRIVE, I can never remember how to operate all the little buttons to change the time, but there’s a manual online: To make the analog hands change time zones, this is a little tricky: The idea is that you…
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ai: Local Builds and how much VRAM
Peter Kukol asked. Great question from months back. How do you run big models like DeepSeek AI or Meta Llama4 on consumer hardware? Should you go big on CPU DRAM or not? Long answer but… Yes, that’s what most people are doing:g buying a big CPU and lots of RAM and a few big Nvidia…
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ai: Best Local Image Models July 2025 and Comfy Missing Manual Addendum
Well, I’ve been keeping track of the latest models in Ollama. This is pretty easy because they have the latest list and we just rotate off old models, trying to keep the total models on the machine to 600GB (wow, that’s a lot!). It is convenient to have the latest sorting, so we can churn…
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vid: Final Cut Pro fix for glitchy OBS recording with AIFF
OK, we are the remote site and needed some audio for a slide show. I then realized that I had an OBS Studio recording so why not just use that. I took the MP4 and put it into Final Cu Pro and the audio started glitching. It was strange because the audio sounded perfect with…
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inet: Saving 20% with a Xfinity Chat
This is my usual annual reminder that you have to check your Xfinity plan, which changes all the time. This year, in 2025, as an example, we were on the 800Mbps/40Mbps plan with $30 for unlimited data at $78. But a quick look shows that the plan is going to $119/month! So first of all,…
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life: Wow Alex is Junior 505 Champion
People never tell me anything, but trolling through Alex Tong’s site and he mentions, “He’s the 2019 North American Junior 505 champion”. I’m like, what? No one tells me anything, but being 10 of 40 boats where 5 of the top best boats in the world are sailing is incredible. Nice work and sometimes you…
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net: Clean copy in neovim and custom mode strangeness in Roo Code
OK, to summarize annoyances today: So the easy commands to yank are: Dealing with Roo Code modes This is a sort of primitive agent system, and it is confusing when things go wrong, so some quick notes: Figuring out how to Manage Office 365 Well, we have this installation to deal with too and its…
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inet: Getting Audio with Google Meets
Ok, this is a good one. If you are using Google Meet extensively, then the Google Meet app works well; it’s just an encapsulated browser, but still. The real mystery has been trying to get the audio to actually flow. Zoom does an incredible job of this, but with Google Meet, it looks like you…
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cell: US Mobile magic multiple networks
One of the cool things about US Mobile, besides the incredibly low price of $33/month if you pay annually, is that it includes 100GB of data in the US and 50GB of high-speed hotspot data per month. Plus, you can choose between Dark Star (AT&T), Warp (Verizon), and LightSpeed (T-Mobile) by TelePortal. Besides better coverage,…
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Protected: dev: The Seven Levels of Heaven for AI-assisted coding the Missing Manual
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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wp: The nightmare that is an IP address change at InMotion and the miracle of warp, 1password
Wow, what a crazy thing, I’m traveling a lot and then suddenly, our main site, tongfmaily.com suddenly goes down with a strange message that just lists the underlying hosting site. I had gotten a notice that some backup files were on the site and I didn’t have a chance to delete them and I did,…