Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, some quick notes, if you are way too focused like me on credit card savings, then the Chase Freedom quarterly bonus is pretty impressive, basically, every quarter they give you 5x points up to $1,500 in spend in a set of categories. You can find all of this at https://chasebonus.com and yes Chase has…

Well, I did a bad update to our Unifi system a few months ago. I forget the exact version, but basically 1.10 or a version like that was a bad update and 1.11 fixed this. This means that I don’t just say auto-update anymore for UniFi as there are lots of remote site right now…

Personally, I just really have owned a lot of bike lights. Starting with the Light & Motion NiMH Metal ARC that weighed in at over three pounds, but over the last 20 years, things have really stabilized around LED lights and they are small and lightweight, so here are some recommendations: Garmin Vario UT 800…

OK, this sounds crazy, but I have eight AirTags attached to my various sets of keys, even luggage, and backpacks. They really do work. I’ve been shocked at how long the batteries last. We got the first thing back in the middle of 2021 when they first launched in April and I’m shocked to see…

I normally do not use Google Chrome or google.com because it is so invasive, so I use Startpage.com which has Google.com search results without tracking, and Vivaldi which is the open-source Chromium with some extras. However, I’ve found today that I have to use Google Chrome for one specific use case. The problem is that…

Ok, want to get super obscure, I just converted a Word document into a Google Doc. This normally works super well, but it was driving me crazy that sometimes I would see a page break and I couldn’t delete it. And when trying to type it would have really strange behavior, I couldn’t for instance…

Well, I’ve been using vim for a long time and it has taken forever to get something that is stable and really fast. I know most folks should probably move to VSCodium (the non tracker version of VSCode), but if you are really married to two things: Incredible speed and there is nothing like a…

OK, I’m spending the entire Memorial Day weekend writing up patents and things, so being efficient has never been more important. So as I sit here typing away, it seems like a good idea to go through how to get this all set up properly for maximum efficiency. So here are the parts: MacBook Pro…

Ok, I’ve been using OBS for six months now particularly for those times when Zoom backgrounds are not enough (or when I’m using Google Meets which doesn’t have much in the way of backgrounds. Sadly, Slack video is particularly awful, it doesn’t understand virtual cameras at all). But here are some tips and tricks to…

We’ve been using various versions of the Philips Sonicare for years now and after the switch to the new brush type, they seem to work well. The main pain is that the battery does die after a while. Normally about 5-7 years which is actually not bad although they are not replaceable so the whole…

This is truly a pain in the butt. But, if you want to migrate devices from one house to another. Right now we work on no less than five homes across the extended family and this leads to all sorts of problems because each Homekit device works different and needs a different reset. The main…

Well, since I’ve been doing lots of documents and working on Safari, I was reminded of the many keyboard shortcuts that you can use with Vimari and of course with Vi itself. But, one project I’ve not had time to try until now is vimac. This is a project that basically goes through graphical elements…

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the traditional bright white with black text is actually pretty hard to read. When I was using Mac Kindle, I noticed their cream-colored paper with their light fonts was much easier to read. Thanks to the miracle of ColorSlurp, I was able to see exactly what color…

I haven’t gotten the latest A9 or the A7 series but have an older A7R3 with a 40MP sensor. With the pandemic, I have basically taken zero photos for the last two years. Now with the A7R4 out with a 60MP sensor at $3.5K and the really remarkable Sony A1 which is a crazy $6K…

OK, I haven’t had to do this for a while, but in playing with , I wanted to get realistic views with TacView, you get sort of a basic 3D view, but you can also get more detailed maps as well. You have to download them to a magic place in TacView Textures to get…

Turns out that with iPhones, it’s pretty easy to play back audio books for Libby which is the friendly version of audio playback with Overdrive or with the Audible application. But, if you have a Mac, then things get a little harder since there are no dedicated Audible or Libby applications for the Mac. You…

OK, since I’ve been using Windows a bit, the hardest thing for a Mac user is that different order of the CTRL, Windows and ALT keys for Windows vs. the Mac use of Ctrl, Option and Command. The big issue is that the copy and paste are in different places so CTRL-C works on the…

OK, I have not been playing computer games for a long time and in the beginning, I just loved realistic simulation games like Harpoon (boring to look at, but so interesting), F-15 Strike Eagle, and F-16 Fighting Falcon. In that era in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a big genre that focused on realism.…

Wow, what a pain, every time I end up at say Alaska Airlines WiFi, airport WiFi or the UW WiFi or Hilton, there is a so-called captive portal that needs to turn on. And with all the security and threat management, it is hard to figure out what to disable to make this work. The…

OK, so the good thing is that GitHub generates all kinds of updates on Python packages which are pretty low level. For instance, it will look at PIpfile.lock and tell you for instance that Pillow needs to be at least version 9.0.1 or that a notebook needs to be at least version 6.4.3. Doing a…

Well, this is pretty amazing, right now, I’m doing a live Slack and also a full UHD Blu-ray backup. And it is running at an incredible frame rate, the CPU is at 80% and the GPU is at 20%, and 57% of the RAM (of a 64GB machine). Here are the tricks you need to…

OK, I finally decided to try a different provider for work. For our home, T-Mobile has just been awesome as a nationwide carrier, but for work, we can’t just use T-Mobile, we need Verizon coverage as well, in looking at the options, US Mobile is an MVNO that is backed by the Verizon when you…

Ugh, I feel so silly right now, I spent the last week trying to make a remote installation of UniFi work without a UniFi Dream Machine (or UniFi Router) as they are both out of stock. This is going to be a mobile installation that uses UniFi WiFi 6 Enterprise access points to provide WiFi…

OK, I finally am close to having our key family photos backed up properly, but I’m getting there, the goal was to get storage at the minimum 3:2:1 level, that is 3 backups with 2 local and one in the cloud, so here is where we are and it is confusing because Synology has four…

I’ve used Kodi for a long time so that I can get my high bit rate 4K HDR films off a dedicated file server. It actually works great for really full quality home movies and things when you don’t want compression artifacts. The truth is that most 4K we watch on steaming is low bit…

OK, I’ve been using drones for a long time, but there are some really confusing and really complicated, but this was my first time using these two drones with the Smart Controllers. I’ve been using my trusty DJI Phantom 3 and DJI Mavic Pro for a long time, so this was a big upgrade, but…

If you are watching Severance, then you know there is an iconic exterior shot. I almost choked when I looked at it and realized that not only had I worked in that building, but so had my Dad and brother. But, it is in Holmdel, NJ and was the site of so many inventions when…

There are definitely bad builds of UniFi. I hit this terribly with the 1.09 release which caused all sorts of troubles, so before you update, you do want to check to see if others have had problems. Here is what I do: I turn off automatic updates on all my Ubiquiti installations and only do…

OK, we just had an interesting network event. Last week, we got a backup cellular connection for our home network since we are doing Work From Home (WFH) so much. Well it turns out it worked so well that we are seeing micro outages with Comcast Xfinity for a minute or so. I think these…

If sometimes you see mysteriously a calendar event arrive in Google, that’s because it is looking for email and it tries to interpret it for things like air travel and events. This actually works decently well except when someone forwards their itinerary, things can get confusing. You can turn this off if you want in…