Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

OK, there are many guides on the Fediverse, but celebrating the three-week anniversary of joining, I was talking with Paul and realized that I probably should write down the highly opinionated way that I’m trying to use it and also explain the basic architecture. It is constantly discussed as open Twitter, but it actually works…

OK, the weekly screwing around with your Mac updates. Here are some of the interesting things I’ve learned… Use APFS and GUID for USB Drives One of my Macs only has a 256GB SSD. That sounds like a lot, but I regularly run out of space and have when I’m home a RAID1 16TB array…

OK, we are using U.S. Mobile for cheap data. They are an MVNO for 5G on Verizon and for 4G LTE on T-mobile and with Verizon, you get pool plans that are pretty reasonable. Basically, $9/phone, and then you pay for the data pool you use which gives you 40GB for $80. So for 9…

Argh, why is it that nearly 50 years after the invention of the PC, just configuring a printer is so hard? We just got a new HP Neverstop Laser 1001nw and this is a tiny little printer, but the best thing about it was that setting it up for the Mac was a breeze. But,…

Ok, time once again for figuring out how to be productive to the max on the Mac, so first asking ChatCPT3, so straight from the collective mouth of the Internet and then culling to the most useful ones, but the ones that I use most often are ⌘-⌥- left and right arrow will move applications…

OK, I saw a post on Mastodon about open-source tools for photo and video editing and it reminded me that I’ve been using DxO PhotoLab for more than 10 years and it is time to see if the open-source tools have caught up. I generally liked DxO over Lightroom because their defaults seem closer to…

Ok, this has to be in the department of infrastructure breaks too much, but I never log in to my MacBook Pro 2017 that I use for backups, and to review here is how I handle backups right now based on the 2022 strategy which has been working pretty well, but it’s a six-layered backup…

I just listened to Why We Sleep. I don’t know how scientific it is, but it sure scared me. With an Apple Watch if you set the sleep time properly by setting your sleep time in the Clock, not knob do you get a notification to sleep as well as a wake up alarm, but…

Most of the time when I get a reference quality Blu-ray, I will use Handbrake to make an archival copy. I find that with a 60GB Blu-ray if I set it for H.265 MKV 2160p60 as the default and make a custom one that matches the frame rate. For instance, NTSC is a really bizarre…

Wow, who would ever have thought we would get to this, now this is Comcast territory so not symmetric, but I’m getting a 1.4Gbps download and a 40Mbps upload now. This required some significant changes to the network. I had been using an Arris SB8200 which is a 32×8 DOCSIS 3.1 modem that has two…