Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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:

This is just part of learning the system but I republished the remastered versions that bump the SDR pieces to pseudo HDR with HDR Tools. They look pretty good in my iPhone which is awesome! The regrading causes Final Cut Pro to hang for several minutes as it renders away but it’s pretty cool. Anyway…

Ok, this has been a really confusing topic that I have to keep reminding myself how it works. But basically, a nit or more properly cd/m^2 Is a measure of how bright a screen is. SDR or standard definition has a range of basically 0 to 100 nits. But high definition range or HDR can…

Ok one issue with Apple iCloud+ is that there’s a limit of six family members (family size-ists!) So we had to create two families and have some duplicate IDs. This family sharing is pretty odd and requires three steps to get going: This took an entire day to get this right. The main reason to…

Wow sucky transient problems are the worst. Here are my two of the week… Mac Browsers stopped working As really strange problem. But the jynenety worked fine but not of the browsers did. Safari, Firefox and Chrome all reported no connection and a proxy problem. When I get these I always disable my NordVPN which…

Well, I just spend an day remastering all our podcasts because heck, the colors were bothering me, they look great thanks to the use of HDR Tools and Apple HEVC 10-bit and it only took 2 hours to process this whole mess (so we are running at over 30 fps on an M1 Max). YouTube…

Just like finally getting a great HDR still image workflow, getting one for video is just as challenging, with the camera setup, I have a special Spyder calibrator with DisplayCal and then getting out true 14-bit RAW output and then using DxO and other systems to get RAW output as well as finally getting to…

If you can, you should make your Health Spending Account contributions. They are $3650 for 2022 (or so) and $3850 for 2023 for individuals. Basically, this is pre-tax money you put into an account and then you can actually invest this money, so if you are just starting out, then this just grows and grows…

OK, we just had another good podcast session and it seems like there are always more notes to take, but dividing the tips for the novice Podcast person, so starting from the top, here is what I’ve learned OK, so our workflow is not OBS which feeds Zoom with a scene output and does the…