Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, I finally got the Nahvalar Original Plus, a nice value, and then the pen of my dreams, the Pilot C843. One came from NJ (near where I grew up) and the other was from Japan. Plus I finally got the Cortex Sidekick. So some reviews of this amazing stuff.. Vacuum Filling Pens: Mysterious in…

Well, we had a nice tasting of a wonderful 1980 Colheita Port and a 20 year Graham Tawny Port as well as a Premier Cru Sauternes. The net is that while sweet they are quite different in how they are made… So we were wondering what all this means: Sauterne A Sauterne is a completely…

Long time since posting. I’m behind with way too much learning about AI these days to post but here’s a quick one. As few devices of mine don’t work with the many rechargeable nimh batteries I have. These are mainly electronics that need the higher voltage of 1.5V that you get with alkaline or lithium…

Ok, this is why. At companies should not make software. On this car there is a basic head unit. And if you want to pair it, you click the Menu button and then scroll down to Settings, Bluetooth and you can see Add New Device and Connect an Audio Device. The problem is that it…

There are not that many titles available in the base Final Cut Pro. Fortunately, you can get a selection of free titles from different sources. Object Tracking The new object tracker is pretty cool in Final Cut Pro 10.6, but pretty hard to figure out how to use it. The main trick here is that…

Well, the AVR-X3800H arrived in November 2022 and while it is incremental to the AVR-X3700H that we got, it is nice to get a true 8K UHD and is more refined incrementally. The main improvements are adding the Auro 3D to the X3700H with a new 1080p user interface. It now has HDMI 2.1 on…

The new Roborock S8 and S8+ and now are available and there is an initial sale where the S8 which the version without a dustbin. The S8+ adds $200 to get a dustbin that you don’t have to empty every time. And the S8 Ultra is $1600 and has a mop system where you don’t…

OK, thanks to Lucas, he reminded me that I’ve been using an excellent webcam, the Logitech BRIO, it does produce 4K SDR output, but it has a consumer-grade lens, so off to try to figure out how to get my old Sony A-7R Mark III (ILCE7RM3) and Sony RX-100 Mark VI both of which produce…

While there are a lot of Zoom Backgrounds, I’ve had the devil of a time figuring out what formats actually work. One thing is for sure: the default format that an iPhone produces is not valid. So with some trial and error and looking at the formats of valid files, it looks like it wants…

OK, now that I can do the basics, how can you add all the details, it turns out that Final Cut Pro is really like iMovie’s big brother, so in the upper left, the object browser that has the ability to import what’s in your existing machine including Photos, Music and they have a huge…

OK, I have two of these mice. One is the DARK CORE RGB PRO SE, which works fine, but when I tried to pair a DARK CORE PRO (this is the version without but without built-in Qi Charging). Here is what happens which seems true for a few users this mouse is incompatible with MacOS…

OK, this has been something I’ve done more and more. With the MacOS, there is pbcopy that lets you pipe in anything into the Mac clipboard, and pbpaste takes it from there, and the more clumsy xcopy or xsel where you have to add options so it’s not as short as pbcopy and pbpaste. This…

Well, Final Cut Pro works pretty much like iMovie in dealing with segments that are recorded at too low a level. The big issue is that the maximum increase in volume is 12dB which really isn’t enough. The problem is that I was messing around with an OBS Studio volume filter and I recorded some…

No really, Vdo.ninja is actually a free resource that does WebRTC which means that all the communications are peer-to-peer and encrypted which is great. More importantly, they support a full 1080p connection so it won’t work in low bandwidth systems, but it is excellent if you are doing podcasts. There are a few tricks here…

OK, if you can believe it, it’s the fifth Podcast with Paul we’ve done and we tried out the first guest podcast so we had me life and then two remote people. Our guess and a new person. This is actually quite a bit harder than it looks, but here’s a quick guide: VDO.Ninja Not…

OK, I’ve been really struggling with accessing this printer. The HP Color LaserJet would work but every time I tried to use it again, my Mac would say not found. The real clue came when I tried to access my Homebridge at homebridge.local and it worked fine on my phone but not on my Mac.…

For some reason, Medium seems to be filled with these little articles about Mac apps and widgets. They are mainly identical (which is why I discontinued my Medium subscription and get most of my content from Mastodon and Reddit these days), but here are some of the great utilities I use daily and am about…

Getting High Dynamic Range (HDR) on your MacOS and iPhone is really complicated. TL;dr is that on your iPhone use the dedicated NetFlix and YouTube applications. On the MacOS, twiddle Safari Develop Experimental Features to turn on VP9 while on Battery and disable Video battery optimization. And yes, I don’t know why any of these…

Well, I was about to get a Roborock S7 as the best choice for Apple Home-enabled vacuum cleaner. I actually ordered it from Walmart and then returned it when I discovered the Roborock S8 was announced at CES. It does seem like there are so many improvements happening right now that the right approach is…

OK, we had a great podcast session today, and here are the big lessons The Tweaks: 4K Zoom integration is awesome when it works but beware hands and Lag Almost all the issues are now with the OBS to Zoom integration, but the big ones are: Fixing the lag in Final Cut Pro If you…

OK, I don’t completely understand what is going on with Final Cut Pro, but I have eight videos of about an hour each and I keep running into the dreaded “Disk Full” messages. So here is what I’ve done: