Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Now that Apple has brought back the MagSafe 3 connector for the MacBook Pro 2021, it made me realize how much I miss this connector for two important reasons so off to look for magnetic connectors that fit USB C or Micro USB physical connectors. These connectors can be two pin so charging only, five…

OK, this was a confusing one for me. In the past, on macOS, when you clock on the Show Tabs Overview at the upper right of the Safari tab bar, I normally expect to see all the shared tabs from other devices. At least this is how it worked MacOS. It is now on the…

Well, every so often I review (Toms’ Guide) these things mainly because the online reviews are really not so helpful, so I installed the base and then tried a set of ad blockers again some test sites like: D3Ward. a pretty simple checker that is open checks the major ad sites, analytic sites, error trackers…

Well, thanks to @alex, who mentioned that he uses zsh and not bash, so I spent or wasted two hours understanding it. It is definitely cool and the high points are: Bash scripts still work. Unlike other shells, the syntax is close to bash and as long as your scripts use #!/usr/bin/env bash then all…

OK, spent an hour with Alex working on this problem. He has some docker images which will not build on Apple AARCH64 (aka Arm64) architecture because they are so old. But Docker apparently allows you to run and build containers that are multiarchitecture. The problem is that the current Docker for Mac v4.3 has a…

OK, so if you are a Zoom disciple, you can see virtual backgrounds and they even have Zoom apps that let you use anything from Pexels. In addition, they have super good keyclick suppression. So if you are using Slack Video or Google Meets, then you are really in trouble if you like typing while…

Most of the iCloud Family Plan is awesome. For $25/month, you get 2TB of family storage for up to six family members. You also get Fitness, Arcade and AppleTV. I don’t know that we use much more than the family storage and AppleTV, but it’s nice to have the other stuff. The most confusing thing…

Ok this is going to be highly subjective, but some opinions: MacBook Pro M1 Pro and Max. These things costs $3-4K and the AppleCare+ is $300 or so for three years. It will be four years if you use an Amex or other card with extended warranty. Personally I’ve found that about half of our…

OK, given how hard it is to get all the trimmings on a LG C9 was super hard, what about a new 2021 43″ Sony LED television which makes a nice “smaller” monitor. To summarize, here are the things you want to change: Overscan. This is an annoying default, but in old analog TVs, the…

OK, this is so embarrassing, I’ve had my LG B9 (I thought for years it was a C9, but it is about the same thing) panel for two years now (got as the Pandemic was happening in December 2019) and I’ve actually never had it optimized for output. The instructions should be similar for the…

Wow, if you want to feel good about life, then you have to watch 14 Peaks, wow what a movie (89% Tomatometer). Nims is really an amazing person and doing all Nepalese climbers are incredible in Mission Possible. Give it a try, but the stories are incredible, but what a great story. If you think…

Argh, this is so frustrating. With Zoom and with Teams but not with Google Meets and Slack, you can get a nice virtual background. Since we’ve switched to Slack for phone calls, the question is how to get those back. It also appears on macOS does not work with FaceTime or Safari which is really…

Ok these really come in two forms. If you have prints then you want a nice flat bed scanner. If you want the highest quality though and you have negatives then you want something that can handle negatives and ideally has something called digital ICE which can remove scratches in the file emulsion (it’s a…

Man, life is complicated. I have no less than five different Métis’s of getting COVID codes. It is literally raining incompatible codes. But the goal is to get it all working where you can just flash a code on your phone and it works everywhere. So here’s a rundown at least for me of the…

When you get a new iPhone and then jump on a plane here are the crazy things (that people done tell you) you need to remember to do: Data roaming for whatever reason is not coming through. This setting is actually really buried in the interface. Settings > Cellular > Data Roaming needs to be…

YOu can now activate for your vanity domain and have it go to your iCloud account and up to three other vanity domains see Apple  or just go to iCloud Custom Domain and this is really handy for my @tongfamily.com and other single use. Twitter feeds and email news letters for anyone engaged in AI, Well, since the…

Well this is for the commercial laden version of Paramount but it’s eight $60 fit the next year. So not bad when combined with the half off you get with Amex for three months. It’s a little annoying that unlike Netflix you don’t get a discount on premium. The commercial free version. I plan to…

OK, this should work for most systems and after a year, I’m shocked at how well everything works. It took me a weekend to update the scripts that I have for installation as there are a few differences, but it is incredible how well it really works: If you are using a dotfile repository (which…

OK, so I made a mistake a while back, I was taking a bunch of ML classes and ended up creating a subdirectory course in my personal repo rich, but that means I’m carrying around 1GB of data that I basically never use. In the old days, this was really hard to fix, but as…

Well, Paul was asking so just how fast is the new MacBook Pro with M1 Max. Well, it was a good question, so a little digging, but some questions: When was RAM slower than the current SSD transfer speeds? How has that ratio of level 1 and level 2 each to ram storage to the…

Well, I’ve been experimenting with using Canva for presentations. It has a really great integrated library of elements and integrates animations way better than Google Slides. But here are some tips: At least on Safari, Canva is a super pig. It can hang entire system spinning. However, the dedicated MacOS application you can get with…

The :g command and it’s reverse :v This Global command is quicker than the typical :s/old/new/g instead the syntax is [range]g/pattern/cmd which is way more general. For for instance, if you wanted deleted all the lines with with world “hello” in it, you type :g/hello/d And there is reVerse version so, :v/hello/d means delete all…

So I keep forgetting how useful macros (and registers are) or repetitive things. Basically, Vi has 10 numeric registers and then alphabetic registers. If you want to see them then type :registers and you can see what is stored there. There are two ways to use them. The first is to stick thinks into a…

In the same way that there is essentially just one mechanical watchmaker, one sunglasse maker and one optical company, there is an incredible concentration in the home theater maker. Like skis and other passion projects the key is to find an independent group that cares about the product. And not a gigantic conglomerate looking for…

Argh this is so complicated and the problem is so silly. So one of our phones is working and the other wasn’t. The short answer is so silly: The checklist What was happening is that I would go to the site but there are a host of requirements to make this work: Enable wifi calling.…

Ok, this has been a problem for the last three months. When I lost my Unifi Dream Machine Pro controller because it was hung, I was an idiot and just did a factory reset. I tried going to the Reddit group, also sending a ticket, but it looks like the geniuses hang out on the…

Well, the various covers and cases are not out yet, but one thing to really consider is AppleCare. With traditional AppleCare for $249, you get three years of coverage and if you use the right Amex or MasterCard, you get an additional year added. But for a device that costs $4K, it might make more…

Well, dual SIMs is a useful feature if you have a work and home number and want to get calls on one phone. Of if you travel a lot and want a local sim. The trick here is that starting with the iPhone XS, Apple supports an eSIM, that is an electronic SIM, so no…

First of all hat tip to Sam on this one. With the new iOS 15 you get both widgets and an App Library so you don’t get endless pages of icons anymore. But the question is how to use all this effectively. Getting it right with Focus, Home Pages and Notifications Right now, I have…

Well, the really cool feature Universal Control where you can just have one keyboard and work across multiple Apple devices isn’t yet here. It turns out it less magical than you think but still awesomely cool. So even without this new feature you can use your iPad as a second screen. Pretty valuable when you…