Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, you can great a very good monitor for $500, but if you want something that is great at HDR, then it is more like $1K for an LG C2 monitor, but what if you want a professional really accurate system. Well, then the monitors increase dramatically in cost. For instance, the Apple Pro display…

Yes, it does seem that every year, there is yet another update to the Mac that means lots of upgrades, the god news is that if you like you can write a script that does it all. I have one call update-annual.sh that does these things: Operating System update. While you can click on settings…

Well, I made a mistake, we’ve had such a good experience with the Lo & Son’s original Travel Bag O.G. 2, it was so reliable with a lifetime warranty. In fact, after 10 years, we actually got a second one that is a little larger. The mistake was that they have dramatically extended their product…

Ok, I don’t often do this, but when I go out and review things and buy them, I nearly always have a quick set of thoughts afterward when I initially install the products, so going from a buying guide to a quick review to a long term review is the plan. You will also see…

OK, this is going to sound nerdy, but doing things around the house or going to a construction site, you should think about these things, so from head to toe, what should a person get: Work Gloves, if you are doing really heavy work then the big leather gloves are great, but if you are…

Well, one thing that I realized I lost the other day was a really cool Leatherman Squirt multitool. I had forgotten it was attached to my backpack and it ended up in the TSA find more stuff locker. So to finding the right kit for those hikes. There are a couple of choices: Multitool. The…

With the pandemic, we got serious about air filters and measurement, here are some notes after using some key tools in the last two years: Air quality monitor. We actually have two of them the Eve and the Kaiterra Laser Egg Plus which was one of the first monitors. There are now lots of them,…

We just love the TeslaCam feature on our car. You plug in a high-reliability miniSD card into the USB hub and. you get continuous loop recording, you get recording on honk so this is just great. In fact, you should probably have a Dash Cam for all your cars, so the big question is what…

Well, we just spent three days out of cell phone coverage in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies, so here are some lessons and things to bring for that situation: Whistle. This is a location that is completely out of cell phone range and there are lots of bears about it, so safety is a…

Ok, this problem has really been bothering me, but I use four levels of python virtualization. I don’t need all of these but they are from history, so they are: Homebrew installation. YOu can install multiple versions of python with brew install python@3.8 for instance. I don’t use this that much, but it lets you…

Well, it’s an interesting time in the Apple lifecycle, basically, the next generation chips are out, so the iPhone 14 Pro gets the new A16 in 4nm and the low-end MacBook Air and Pro 13 get the new M2 in 5nm. So the performance improvements are massive, about 20% for M1 to M2, but still…

Well, I’ve already written how you can edit and shoot an entire wedding video on the iPhone 12 Pro Max with the included iMovie, but just this week, I did a series of “dailies” from a hiking trip that went really well. We were completely off the grid, so all the photos had to be…

OK, we had a six-hour-long power failure here. Fortunately, Seattle City Light does a great job keeping people informed if you have access to the Internet at their outage page. You just call (206) 684-3000 to report one. And in our case, we were down from 930-1630 or so. The other interesting thing was that…

OK, early this year, I did some research on how to get HDR and Spatial Audio working on the Mac and iDevices and things have gotten a little better but to remind people, there are two cases, dedicated applications that are available on the iPhone and then on the Mac, there are dedicate applications like…

Ok, there are times when I want to organize a collection of MP3s as a single anthology. That is I want to override the individual album names and also rename the files so they all go together. As an example, if I want all the Billboard Hot 100 songs of 2000 in a single place,…

OK, most of the Unifi recommendations are that you turn off automatic frequency assignment and then do it, yourself. Of course there are very few guides that tell you exactly how to do that, but basically, there are few ideas that I use. The Basics: non-overlapping channels There are six 80MHz 5GHz channels. We try…

Huge thanks to @matthew for this tip. But someone who shall remain nameless accidentally stepped on their gossamer gear trekking pole and the bottom third snapped leaving part of it inside the telescoping system. This thing has a friction fit joint. And while Gossamer gear has an awesome repair site to get the lower piece…

Wow, this was really hard. The basic problem was I think the directions have changed quite a bit, but the main trick or problem is that with Android 12, you actually need to put a physical SIM into it to “trick” it into giving you an esim (aka SIM2), so the steps are: You need…

Ok, here is a very mysterious problem for you, with an M1 MacBook Pro, I suddenly could not connect my Bluetooth keyboards. For full context, I use three different (yikes!) mechanical keyboards with Bluetooth depending on my mood. Two are AnnePro2 with Gateron Blue and Kailh Box White switches and then I have a Keychron…

I kind of give up these days, anytime there is bright sunlight it is hard to see. And when I look at my Kindle Paperwhite, I just wonder if there is a better way. Well, it turns out they are niche products, but e-ink (which is a patented technology) is available from third parties as…

Ok, if you are setting up a large installation and have to use wired because the system does not support wireless for things like GPS RTK systems or there are jitter problems on WiFi, then you are going to need some long-ass cables. So how long can you actually go: USB Cables. The main thing…

OK here is a strange error. I hope you do not get this. Occasionally, our Unifi Dream Machine flags a push to GitHub as an information leak. This manifests itself as hang when trying to do a git push or git pull. The fix is pretty simple (although the Unifi Console UI keeps changing), but…

OK, some more crazy Vim tricks. I have vi sets so that a window pops up with lint errors and this can be annoying. Turns out there is a hack to close windows quickly. Normally I do a CTRL-W CTRL-W to get to the window and then can do a zz to close it. but…

OK, this is a strange problem, but I’ll document it for myself. I use Veracrypt to store my ssh keys and other things. They are actually protected by passwords, but as a safeguard, I also store them in a secure Veracrypt mount that is in turn in a Google Drive so I can share it…

Wow, the ASUS X13 (2022) convertible notebook is a nice nVidia GTX 3050Ti thin and light notebook. It is on sale for $1300 at Best Buy right now and it has a Ryzen 6000 processor with 16GB of memory and 1TB hard drive. There are some things that are hard to do: Turned the thing…

I’ve been using the Juno Jupiter Pro for a while now. It’s a pretty awesome dedicated Ubuntu laptop. The main limitation is that it is 3.5 pounds but it does require a large brick so really it’s more like 4 pounds. It does have 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD and an nVidia RTX 3050ti.…

OK, it used to be that you would just dump anything you don’t need into the garbage and it would find itself in a landfill. Well, we are far from those days, today, every day there is regular waste, there is green waste and there is recycling plus lots of other special things, so here’s…

Do you know how sometimes one thing leads to another? In my case, it started with climate change which leads to 90 degree plus days in Seattle which leads to wanted to sit outside instead of swelter indoors which leads to wanting to write some code outside which leads to trying to get better colors…

We have a WaterCop system at home from the ancient days before Apple HomeKit and also an old lighting system. The first one has false alarms and we can’t ever tell which sensor actually triggered since they all feed a single sensor into the alarm system. The lighting system has failing switches so things like…

One of the cool things that GitHub handles pretty well is changing your company’s organization. For instance, if you have a secret name, say Acme, then you create an organization and your main repo could be in git@github.com:acme/src, but what if you want to change your name? Then you just click at the top and…