Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

This is our second attempt at this and we’ve discovered that Zoom can get into a mode where it is just very slow but a complete reboot seems to help. We also have a host of tricks with OBS, but see what you think. YouTube Video Podcast The Podcast version Spotify also has a video…

OK, every year, I get a new key from the Microsoft Alumni. This is a nice benefit (although I confess I don’t use Office that much), but I can never remember how to use the key, so here’s a quick guide: I know I’ll be referring to this every year 🙂

Well, this used to be super easy, the JetPack share post allowed unlimited sharing across Facebook, LinkedIn (and a horrible site that rhymes with Wither). But now they’ve just installed a check where you “only” get 30 cross-posts a month. With the volume that I’ve been running, it’s hard to stay under that limit. Connecting…

Ok, this area of Netlify is super confusing, but basically, there is the concept of a deployment key and this appears to work if you have a private submodule but not all the time. GitHub has this limit where you can only use a single SSH key per user or per deployment key in a…

Ok a few quick notes. As we ramp to two podcasts a week: The workflow works well. Start with Freeform notes and have some topics you care about and folks who are used to Zoom which is just about the entire world The technical pipeline is to use Open Broadcaster Software Studio. OBS Inputs. With…

Well, we did the second-best thing I’ve ever done in my life which is the second podcast. This is our first podcast that uses Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) for video production. Still rough, but the browser screen is now center stage (and it didn’t need some fancy mixing controller, it just worked by piping in…

OK, it’s gotten complicated again to figure out how to book a hotel, there is no single low price anymore, but here is a guide. First select an area that you want to go to, then you have to compare the net prices taking into account both the portal bonus and the offers: Chase: Portal…

Well, I’ve had one of these water flossers for years and they do seem to work. So along with ultrasonic toothbrushes, this seems like an essential Smart EDC for everyone, so what can you get now? In looking at lots of reviews it’s pretty clear that they work better than regular floss. There are lots…

While you can do this probably with sed or awk, split is definitely easier. A hat tip to @guy for telling us all about it. Basically, if you want to split a file into chunks of 1,000 lines, it will do this and add a prefix, so if you have log.txt, then split log.txt will…

Here getting the podcast player doesn’t quite work from Blubrry, but the Pocket Casts is working. You can subscribe. And here are the show notes. We annotate everything (just to prove we know what we are talking about and also the errata as speaking contemporaneously results in errors for me). But here are Paul and…

Ok, starting up the new podcast world for the first time, we should shortly have the new PTCast for Paul and Tong’s Excellent Podcast published here (thanks to Anchor.fm and YouTube). We had our first technical rehearsal. We will get Open Broadcast Studio up at some point, but we did learn how to make it…

Well, I’ve had an old Yubikey 4C around for ages and tried to get it to work a few years ago. But with all the concerns about security, I’ve always wanted to understand this. Plus, Apple is trying to get everyone to be passwordless and that is a good thing. Using 1Password is great, but…

Well, I’ve never actually had this problem before, but my MacBook Pro 2016 has been freezing and in trying to get it work and sadly this looks like it might be a RAM problem in the machine as I am getting a hash mismatch error. I tried a reinstall and I’m hoping this works, but…

I’ve had a huge number of different heart rate monitors over the years. I still have my very first chest bands made by Polar and Suunto. These needed a proprietary watch and then the batteries would die and they are not user replaceable so you have to send them off. In the last five years,…

Inspired by our latest conversations with Paul and Deon to restart our Podcast. We started two years ago just as the pandemic started using anchor.fm and did get distribution across no less than ten different distribution systems like Apple, Google, Spotify, and even Tunein (for Tesla), but it wasn’t a format that was particularly interesting.…

So what is all this then about cables? As previous posts have shown the differences between USB C as a connector type and what runs on it are super confusing. But the essential points when buying cables are to realize the data protocols are completely separate from the amount of power delivered, so the relevant…