Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Well now that we seem to be getting back to traveling again. Calvin asked what’s a good set of carry on luggage to get. Well I’ve had lots of carry ins over the years and here are some observations: You get what you pay for. Yes you can get $50 luggage but most likely it…

OK, so one of the great things about Android is how many attachments there are via the USB C port. There are not a lot of real choices here the two big ones are FLIR and Seek according to Digital Camera World and Industrial Reviews as well as TEquipment on Youtube Seek Thermal CompactPRO. This…

Well we use Silicon Valley Bank for most of our company banking. It’s a habit because they’ve been so good to us over the years. But, their business account system is pretty hard to navigate. The user interface is deep and there are menus after menus, so here are some notes on some common things…

For a long time, I’ve kept all my tools in various horrible places and they are stacked everywhere. I’ve always wanted a real pro tool cabinet where everything can be in one place. These things are super heavy if they are good, so it’s a good idea to get them locally and find a car…

Man it’s just about impossible to figure out what syncs with what and it is always changing what works with what, but the basic problem is that I have no less than six different main places where I’m tracking my workouts and it is so confusing which are and the syncing sort of works, but…

Wow, I can’t believe Universal Control actually works and it is remarkable. First of all the setup is pretty complicated. Here is what you need to do to get this to work: Update iPadOS 15.4 and MacOS 12.4. This means go to System Preferences in MacOS and choose update and Settings/About for iPadOS. Then you…

Back two years ago, I was trying to use hashdeep to make sure that my files particularly JPEGs were not bit rotting. I’ve had dozens of JPEGs die in the past because of bit rot. I had a bad RAID controller 10 years ago that killed a bunch of JPEGs, so I’ve been obsessed with…

Well this was some work, but we have the 1.2Gbe/35Mbps and I wanted to figure out a way to do this with my existing hardware, it turns out with some tricks to getting this to work right, but if you want to do something similar here are key tricks. I could have also gotten a…

Ok some truly miscellaneous things on our Amazon shopping list: Shop vac replacement cartridge filter and bags We have shop vac 6 gallon vacuum and it works great, but the filter is completely shot because we used it to vacuum 10 pounds of baking soda that was soaking up mineral oil (a long story!), so…

Ok, so we’ve been using Apple Home and the underlying Homekit for the last two years. Given the privacy benefits, we ended up turning off Amazon Alexa, Ring and Google Home as well. The main issue is that there only a limited number of manufacturers who support Homekit natively. So for instance Eufy does a…

It does seem like so many applications want access to the Accessibility settings of MacOS. In looking at my own login, I see no less than 12 applications that want access to it. Why and what does it mean and should I be concerned? Well, the core of it is that it is not really…