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net: Chase Unenroll ACH Blocking
This is a nifty feature of Chase. If you have a business, you can enroll in ACH Debit Blocking. This keeps people from sucking money out of your accounts without you looking. It’s pretty easy to start Chase.com -> Security -> Enroll in ACH Debit Block It appears on the front screen, but if you…
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net: Airbnb We’re having trouble redeeming your gift card
If you get this dreaded message, be aware that they have a time-bound limit filter; if you add too many gift cards at once, they block it, so you need to go to support and patiently get a payment specialist to unblock it. I can see why this happens. If you have fraud, then there…
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net: AARP Reward must use Safari on Mac
Well, one of the better deals right now is that from AARP (if you qualify!) you can get 5% off of gift cards on things like AirBNB. What isn’t obvious and has to be the first time it has happened for me, is that neither Chrome nor Brave on the Mac will correctly handle their…
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ai: Roo Code, Claude Code and Open WebUI Missing Manual 2025-07
Wow, what a powerful open source project, this is in the class of seemingly infinite AI Coders, but the use of “modes” (what the current hype calls Agents ), but it’s super great, although a little confusing to use, so here are some notes: Strange asdf and roo code interaction with claude OK, figure this…
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ai: Open WebUI -1 problems, more ram, $200 plans and ComfyUI URLs
OK, some miscellaneous but valuable comments in the AI journey Open WebUI model parameters redux The context length and other parameters of Open WebUI are really low, like 2K context windows. This doesn’t make any sense in the era of AI coding. Some defaults help a bit, which we’ve covered before. Like -1, but I…
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pod: RT9. Quick Test and more on Claude Deep Research
Another short test with YouTube, LinkedIn, but actually, the content is sort of interesting, how to do prompting and think of it like a programming language
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sw: Passport photo workflow redux
Every six months or so, I have to get some photos or visa photos, and it is so complicated (and who wants to pay $30 per photo). So here is the workflow that works at home:
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cell: At&T Hotspot strangeness and the magic of APN profiles and “dun”
Long story short hotspotting is great and we had great luck on light speed (T-mobile) on US mobile with Nexus 6 phones but sigh not this time: Net, net, the Android APN defaults are wrong from US Mobile at least for the Xiaomi phone. The APN profile needs to explicitly say “dun” in it or…
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edc: Setting Time on Casio Promaster C660
I know I’ve posted about this before, but with the very cool looking CITIZEN Promaster C660 ECODRIVE, I can never remember how to operate all the little buttons to change the time, but there’s a manual online: To make the analog hands change time zones, this is a little tricky: The idea is that you…
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ai: Local Builds and how much VRAM
Peter Kukol asked. Great question from months back. How do you run big models like DeepSeek AI or Meta Llama4 on consumer hardware? Should you go big on CPU DRAM or not? Long answer but… Yes, that’s what most people are doing:g buying a big CPU and lots of RAM and a few big Nvidia…
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ai: Best Local Image Models July 2025 and Comfy Missing Manual Addendum
Well, I’ve been keeping track of the latest models in Ollama. This is pretty easy because they have the latest list and we just rotate off old models, trying to keep the total models on the machine to 600GB (wow, that’s a lot!). It is convenient to have the latest sorting, so we can churn…
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vid: Final Cut Pro fix for glitchy OBS recording with AIFF
OK, we are the remote site and needed some audio for a slide show. I then realized that I had an OBS Studio recording so why not just use that. I took the MP4 and put it into Final Cu Pro and the audio started glitching. It was strange because the audio sounded perfect with…
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inet: Saving 20% with a Xfinity Chat
This is my usual annual reminder that you have to check your Xfinity plan, which changes all the time. This year, in 2025, as an example, we were on the 800Mbps/40Mbps plan with $30 for unlimited data at $78. But a quick look shows that the plan is going to $119/month! So first of all,…
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life: Wow Alex is Junior 505 Champion
People never tell me anything, but trolling through Alex Tong’s site and he mentions, “He’s the 2019 North American Junior 505 champion”. I’m like, what? No one tells me anything, but being 10 of 40 boats where 5 of the top best boats in the world are sailing is incredible. Nice work and sometimes you…
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net: Clean copy in neovim and custom mode strangeness in Roo Code
OK, to summarize annoyances today: So the easy commands to yank are: Dealing with Roo Code modes This is a sort of primitive agent system, and it is confusing when things go wrong, so some quick notes: Figuring out how to Manage Office 365 Well, we have this installation to deal with too and its…
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inet: Getting Audio with Google Meets
Ok, this is a good one. If you are using Google Meet extensively, then the Google Meet app works well; it’s just an encapsulated browser, but still. The real mystery has been trying to get the audio to actually flow. Zoom does an incredible job of this, but with Google Meet, it looks like you…
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cell: US Mobile magic multiple networks
One of the cool things about US Mobile, besides the incredibly low price of $33/month if you pay annually, is that it includes 100GB of data in the US and 50GB of high-speed hotspot data per month. Plus, you can choose between Dark Star (AT&T), Warp (Verizon), and LightSpeed (T-Mobile) by TelePortal. Besides better coverage,…
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Protected: dev: The Seven Levels of Heaven for AI-assisted coding the Missing Manual
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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wp: The nightmare that is an IP address change at InMotion and the miracle of warp, 1password
Wow, what a crazy thing, I’m traveling a lot and then suddenly, our main site, tongfmaily.com suddenly goes down with a strange message that just lists the underlying hosting site. I had gotten a notice that some backup files were on the site and I didn’t have a chance to delete them and I did,…
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pod: Rich and Steve LinkedIn Live Q2 Predictions
Another LinkedIn Live I forgot to post on audio channels. Sorry about that. This is from May 15, 2025 which seems like ancient history. Good news is our 2024 predictions were pretty good!
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ai: OpenWebUI Missing Mac Manual with Ollama and ComfyUI notes v2.1 2025-05-04
Well, Open WebUI is an incredible project that provides a nice graphical front end for local AI development, but the documentation is lacking. You can figure some things out by looking at the documentation, but mainly it is trial and error. The original v1 Missing Manual is here. This adds more things (and also a…
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net: Making Zoom Backgrounds with Apple Photos and Final Cut Pro redux
OK, I think I’ve finally figured out a bunch of things about making Zoom Backgrounds. The first is that it will only accept 1080p SDR videos, so here’s the easiest way to make them for yourself: Taking the Photos, prop it, shoot in Action Mode or 4K and HDR The first thing is that you…
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tvl: Lord of the Rings Locations (LOtR)
Welt’s been two decades of loving Lord of the Rings and watching it on everything from the Cinerama to home theaters to phones. But, there is nothing quite like getting to New Zealand and seeing some of the locations for real. There are lots of list, but none of them super complete. But some of…
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tax: The many ways to Pay US Taxes
This is such a confusing subject because besides writing a check, there are so many way to pay, here are some of them: If you have the misfortune to be a trustee, then you have to make online payments with for 1041 trusts with EFTPS which is complicated.
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Mac: Annoying “would like to access data from other apps”
You get this warning a lot these days with MacOS Sequoia. What is happening it that if you do not set in Settings > Security > Disk and Privacy > Full Disk Access then this comes up. So be careful what you give the rights too, but for instance Terminal and item are good candidate.
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nvim: The Missing Manual for NeoVim v0.9 2025-03-31
Neovim has become such a rich product that even though it is a very fast command-line tool (unlike VS Code), I still use it extensively because you don’t need a mouse. You can do all this in VS Code, but if you want to be that Ferrari 1960s vintage driver with no assist at all,…
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net: Google Shared Drive Missing Manual v0.9 2025-03-31
Well, we finally moved from using shared folders to Shared Drives adding a whole new level of permissions confusion. We have a few goals: This turned out to be quite a bit harder than you think. So here’s the missing conceptual manual of what is going on. Shared Drives Need to Be Created Out of…
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read: From the CDL Reading Group with Ken Liu
Wow that group is awesome, but some great short stories You should read them all!
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fcp: The Mystery of Final Cut Pro Captions
Well, they finally added automatic caption creation, but of course they are biased towards the apple itt format so nothing much happens. So here is a guide to making captions work:
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obs: HDR Output not looking great
OK, I’ve been doing a lot of HDR work and it’s been mysterious how to set OBS to do this properly. I tried to do one and the colors were way off, but looking at Reddit, you get to the OBS notes and it says that is it. using the latest Screen Capture Kit from…