Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well, the first WiFi 6E devices are finally arriving. As an example, the still in early access Ubiquity Access Point WiFi 6 Enterprise (U6 Enterprise) is available. At the maximum, it has 4×4 MU-MIMO in 6, 5, and 2.4GHz. It does need a 2.5Gbps Ethernet connection to really make this work and the new 2.5Gbps…

Certain electronic devices can’t get by with the normal NiMH batteries, for instance, our Brother P-touch PT70BM label maker needs 1.5V and it won’t work with normal rechargeables so you need to install Lithium batteries if you want a rechargeable solution like these USB rechargeable AAA batteries from Pownergy or buy an ugly wall wart.…

Well, I would never have thought it, but in addition to being a cesspool of negative thoughts and cat pictures, Twitter it turns out is becoming the place where new papers and work get announced. But of course, you have to be smart about the feed that you are using, so Springboard has a great…

OK, so Apple just announced their equivalent of Netflix Party, called SharePlay, so you can now watch movies together with friends over a FaceTime chat, but it is bizarrely complicated to figure out how to do it. There are application-specific ways to do this using Disney+ Watch Parties, but this is a more general way.…

This is actually very hard. Originally, when Apple had a five-camera limit on HomeKit Secure Video recording, we had two accounts both with Apple One on them. One had two houses in the family with three cameras. And the other five cameras. We also had Meross smart switches, Philips Hue lights, and HomePods which were…

Turns out that you would think that a simple drag and drop would suffice. Well it turns you guessed wrong. Here are the steps to take your nice video and make it work for Zoom backgrounds First of all, there are a set of requirements in the base hardware and the Zoom version for backgrounds.…

OK, last month, the big victory was getting Gogo Inflight to finally work on my iPhone 12 Pro Max with Alaska Airlines (I don’t know if it will work elsewhere, but it does work now). Now, the next confusing mix of solutions, but I finally got it to work by turning off NordVPN and most…

Wow, this is one confusing mouse. I got it over the simple Apple Mouse for one reason, it has Qi charging in it, so you don’t have the flip the mouse over on its belly and charge it. Otherwise, it is pretty much a huge pain because it is targeted at the gaming community. But…

Well, we started with a general list of USB adapters from PC Magazine. These are actually really hard to find because most desktops today have a WiFi adapter. So I start with a list of good USB Adapters and settled on the TP-Link T9UH is the most common for $50 at Amazon. But it turns…

Ok, I have a great we have an Ikea light that is a little strange. The shade disintegrated. It is ten years old and had a plastic shade that literally got so brittle it just broke apart. The system is really different, rather than having a harp, the shade actually mounts below the lightbulb. I…

OK, during the pandemic, I’ve been putting off the day when I need to fill up my drive again and now I have 10GB free in a 42TB disk array. Yikes. Fortunately, the disk system (a Synology DS2413+) has 12 drive bays and there are two free ones. The system runs as two RAID10, so…

OK, I got a bunch of keyboards over the last week and here now is the review of my favorites in classic reverse top 10 order. It is actually hard to review this since keyboards are a combination of three things, the keyboard itself, the key switches which make the clicks, and then the feel…

Well, with Matrix Resurrection out, I’m just shocked at how good it looks in HDR. A great reason to get a new television with these HDR focused films like No Time to Die or Dune coming out now. But it reminded me that I loved the Matrix screensavers when they were out for the PC.…

Well, I have a collection of sort of bright to super bright headlamps and four years ago, I got the Coast FL85 which is a 600 lumen super bright headlight that uses three AAA batteries. Sadly although it has a lifetime warranty even while used indoors, the switch finally failed. I also have a bunch…

Argh, this has been frustrating for two years, I’ve looked and looked for the Superhuman commands that would take you to the very top of a mailbox or to the very bottom and nothing seems to list it. But finally, I had the inspiration to just try the Vi equivalent command which are gg to…

OK, I have a Synology and I have to admit I use about 1% of the applications that are there, you can run docker containers, they have all sorts of dedicated applications, but to reduce the attack surface area for various SmartHome devices, I like to have purpose devices since the cost is relatively low.…

OK, it does seem like such a deep product but there always seem like a few new things to learn with vi. Here are some really useful ones. The g and z commands arrived because they were relatively unused. So here’s a quick list of useful ones zz. I’ve always know that with H or…

OK, I’ve been spending way too much time in the keyboard hobby, now that I have basically every variant of factory-made keyboards, it’s time to go off the deep end and build my own keyboard, so here is what I’ve learned for those of you who want to dive deep. Bluetooth Hot-swappable Keyboard I wanted…

OK, so all the Apple announcements last year, it’s hard to know exactly what to buy but here are some recommendations thinking about a typical user who does mainly browsing and using the Internet and then a more hard-core user who is into video editing, photography, etc. The main resource I use here is the…

Idk why but I keep buying these vintage keyboard recreations? Maybe just being bored in COVID isolation just make be more inclined to surf the net. I know, first world problems, but in looking at old keyboards, here are some wants: IBM Selectric keyboard. I still remember the first time I saw that crazy ball…

Well, all this technology is so new, it’s not surprising how hard it is to make it all work, but with HDR and multichannel audio to work properly is actually pretty hard. We’ve already talked about the first level which is getting the base MacOS to push out 120fps UHD HDR with full 4:4:4 chroma…

Wow, this is actually pretty incredible, but with macOS Monterey, you can route audio to *any* Airplay device, it appears to know how to make Airplay 1 devices like an old Apple TV 3rd generation play multiple audio, so when you go to Apple Music and choose the radio icon at the upper left, you…

Ok, happy New Year and it seems like looking for cool little apps time, some of the ones working for me are: Rectangle. Well, I’ve used Divvy for a long time and it works but it is paid. I tried Hammerspoon, but it was hard to get what I really want which is dividing a…

OK, this has always annoyed me, MacOS to be safe for ordinary people doesn’t by default does not let you look at so called dotfiles (like .bashrc) or hidden system files in Finder. This is usually fine, but there are some times when you need it. For instance if you want to drag and drop…

OK, I’m actually a little shocked I am using this mailer for the last two years, but it has been an incredible productivity tool. The main limitation is that it is Google Mail only as a backend and that it does not have a unified inbox, so your contacts for each account are separate and…

OK, I had this problem with my personal repo where I had copied a bunch of courses that meant I was dragging around a lot of git lfs content. The solution was to recreate the repo as a new “richtong” repo, but this meant that all the organizations where I’m working needed major surgery to…

OK, I have to say the strangest thing about Google Workspace (nee GSuite) is that they don’t have email aliases. Instead, the idea of a BBS (bulletin board system from the 1980s) is mashed up with a Newsletter and then get contorted into an internal email alias. Well, the need is pretty simple (but hard…

OK, now that I’ve been using it for a bit here are some simple tips and tricks for OBS When you first install it. To get the virtual camera working you need to reboot the machine. Thanks @mcqueen for discovering that one! If you have a font you like, you can use WhatTheFont to figure…

Well with the licensing change that Docker is making everyone seems to be looking for an alternative, but this got real when @alex realized that the Docker Desktop for the Mac does not work with Jupyter Notebooks running on AMD64 that is 64-bit Intel at all after v4.0 and they won’t fix it. It seems…

Well, it is going to be another long dark winter of doing Zooms, so what are the best things for lighting. We have one setup that works well for podcasting with a single key light and a good Logitech BRIO camera plus a nice microphone (which are now down to $150 from their $199 list…