Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, this is a strange, but amazingly wonderful thing, there’s a WordPress plug-in that converts every post from a WordPress site into a Mastodon one. So now if you search for @rich@tongfamily.com on Mastodon or Pixelfed, you will see the latest posts from this website. Basically, it emulates a few cool protocols, there is webfinger…

Well, I just got the Elgato S60+ which lets my Sony A7R3 push 4K resolution output, but today, I finally got my Shure V83F microphone working. Hooking it up is actually pretty confusing since there are so many different ways to do it, but the short notes are: Setting up the filters for Shure VF83F…

OK, I’ve been running Tongfamily.com on Digital Ocean for the last five years and it has been fairly trouble-free (particularly when I added the 2GB swapfile) to prevent out-of-memory problems, but the last two days it has been crashing. It turns out that my simple installation with a 25GB disk has been running out of…

While you can get coffee from Starbucks or from Safeway, it’s fun to try some more artisanal varieties. I’ve JBC before and they have an interesting and rotating selection. Plus, you can get them with free shipping if you order three or more and there are various other deals. I am not a coffee expert,…

I had never seen this message before, but if you use certain advanced features then you have to get rid of your old devices. The two break points are using Advanced Data Protection which means that everything in iCloud uses end to end encryption. Including all york photos and things. The big trade off is…

OK, they just changed the way that Google Workspace works, it used to be free unlimited storage and now it is 5TB per person, so time to figure out how to move things away from Google Workspace. This got me thinking about what we really use Google for, the main thing is the spam filter…

OK, what is going on with the watch bands I haven’t gotten yet, so a companion to the last post about bands I’ve gotten, I would say I haven’t found the perfect set by any means, but Tech Radar has a bunch that I should try (these are mainly the name brands I’ve been thinking…

Well, there are a million Apple Watch bands out there from the incredibly expensive Roo ones that literally cost $2. I decided to buy an assortment based on the reviews out there and tell you that a $99 Apple band is really worth it. The main surprise is that the big standard Apple bands are…

Well, it’s been an amazing two months since our last set of Podcasts and we’ve been busy, particularly in many WhatsApp, Signal, and Discord chats, but finally, with new equipment (a new Elgato S60+ and a little impromptu time), we return. And of course we also have a Spotify Podcasters version that will also appear…

Ok, this one has really been bugging me. I’ve been using Apple Compressor because it is just way (like 10x faster) than Final Cut Pro > File > Share > Apple 4K. But, every so often I get this annoying RequestCVPixelBufferFrame (how user-friendly message). There is a lot on the Internet (and no, you shouldn’t…

OK, it is just incredible how complicated it is to get anything to work correctly, but this is a relatively advanced podcast studio where I want to use the high-quality 4K output (not from a webcam with its relatively crappy lens) but with a great Sony Zeiss 55mm F/1.4 lens. It turns out it is…

Wow, Daniel has his grandfather’s Rolleiflex, a truly famous 35mm camera from the last century. Super cool and I said, oh that looks like a Brownie. A quizzical look and I had to explain the Kodak Brownie (which looks superficially similar) was the camera that brought photography to the masses. This was the original camera…

Well, the last Ink Plus promotion means you have to spend $6K by June 20 to get 90K points which is pretty incredible. Here are some ways to use spend it. You have to do this within three months, so pay attention! Office supply spending is at 5x. So you can double dip if you…

OK, just a reminder as sometimes you get unlucky and your flight is delayed, you are going to miss your connection and you need a hotel. Here are the things not to do: 1. Don’t depend on the airline to take care of you, most of the time, without airline status you are just one…

OK, this is a miscellaneous list of silly bugs that thing that we all get to live in our daily lives. Fastboot in Android I have a new Android phone and somehow I managed to get a screen that just said “FASTBOOT” and I had no idea what to do. It turns out that if…

OK, if you haven’t been living under a rock, then you know presenting things on Zoom is usually a chore, the main issue is that if you have to show a video and you want it to be indexed, that is you just want to show a segment, Google Slides has this great feature which…

Well, I’ve had an old Nexus 5 and a Google Fi plan for emergencies, but now that I realize you really should have two phones with you, on international trips, I decided to turn on this plan. It is a minimal $20 plan with $10/GB, but it works well for emergencies. The problem is that…

Jon said, “Apple is definitely not that innovative”, but sometimes to me, its the simpler things that make innovation happen. A good example is trying to keep this house as smart as possible. It is definitely complicated. Two examples are trying to get the new Xiao Mi RoboRock S8 running. So for those of you…

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…