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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…
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net: Google Drive Sharing dual layer
OK, so we have Google Drive for sharing things and man has it gotten complicated. The problem is that sharing is more restricted now and the default is that you cannot share things with non-workspace members. It is confusing because when you try to share with someone, you set it and then it doesn’t take,…
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pod: Rich and Steve Talk Deepseek
Well, I somehow forgot all about podcast publishing, things get too busy, but now things from way back in February are getting caught up. Here is one where Steve Suarez and I talked about Deepseek R1. A little dated now in September, but for posterity
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dev: ubuntu 22.04 google chrome and asdf strangeness
Well, asdf, direnv and the plug asdf-direnv are wonderful when they work, but very mysterious when they don’t. As of today, you need to use my build of asdf-direnv and you also have to do some work to setup it up if you are on a out of date Linux Ubuntu box. Here are the…
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dev: The pain of moving from wsn to ws fixing ComfyUI Desktop, asdf
Sam showed me years ago a great way to organize your local machine. Basically you create workspace directory ws and then you put git, data, cache and everything else you need to build for that project. For a long time ws was my home GitHub project I keep at richtong but lately we’ve been so…
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mac: No space because of Time Machine hidden in Restricted Files
I had totally forgotten that I had setup one of my machines with Time Machine. Most of the time it has no impact, but when you are trying to download 500GB of LLM models it makes a difference. Time Machine is supposed to be smart about local snapshots, but when you delete a lot of…
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git: tag overwrites, recursing submodules and fetching them
Well this is really advanced stuff, but with large mono repos you really want things to stay in sync, so here are some tricks:
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dev: git submodule magic
Well, git submodules are useful and frustrating at the same time, since we have literally a few dozen of these, I finally spent time figuring out what was wrong and it comes down to two commands and making sure you do not have error: Now that this is set, by default you are in detached…
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mac: Text to Speech and Speech to Text
As part of their accessibility offerings they have a ton of cool but hidden features. here are my favorites Clock speaking every 30 minutes Apple has made it really hard to find settings, they are buried everywhere, but in System Settings > Control Center > Clock > Clock Options you can select Announce the Time…
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tvl: I’m a Data Roaming idiot
Ok this is so silly but if you are traveling v through SE Asia here are some tips:
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ai: Exo for distributed AI
This is a cool tool that lets you jam multiple Macs (or other machines together) and run inference in a circle with a project called EXO It does require a bit of setup. I tried to do a pipx install of it, but it is not packaged that way. You also can’t do a `pipx…
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ai: ComfyUI and Video Generation Missing Mac Manual v1.6 2025-04-27
OK, my previous post on Open WebUI was getting long, so here is a getting a little long and while it covers ComfyUI integration, the bigger topic of using ComfyUI is scattered all over the winds. So if you just want to get ComfyUI to work, here’s the missing manual for that. Some of this…
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pod: London AI Hub January 13 2025
Well we had another one of these great events and it was so good to hear from everyone there and here is the Zoom. It’s a little ugly and messy but gets the points across which are: See it here on YouTube Or check it out as a Podcast on Spotify or listen on Apple…
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inet: Google Drive Storage Counts Get Real
For a long time I’ve wondered how Google Drive does it, no matter how many Google Slides I store with no matter how many images, the storage count against me is always 137 bytes or something. They only count the pointer and not the storage. I woke up this morning to the warning, “you are…
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mac: Getting great Text to speech
While there are better systems out there of course, nothing is better than free and what the Mac has isn’t bad. It is a complete pain to setup, but basically, you have to:
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wp: Removing local backups with Updraft on WordPress
I’ve been a faithful users of Updraft for a long time, but because I haven’t used shared hosting in a long time, the backup files have not been a problem (and don’t take much space), but Inmotion has an automatic searching tool that looks for backup files and they bang on you if you have…
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dev: Getting rid of Git LFS
This thing is a bit of a pain, it is very expensive on Github although they’ve lowered the price artificially, it is $5 for 50GB of Git LFS storage. As long as you keep your files less than 100MB you shouldn’t have a problem, but how do you get rid of it once you have…
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web: Need an A Record for SOA propagation
OK, I was too clever by half and it bit me. Basically, I have lots of different hosting providers, I’ve used Bluehost, Inmotion, Cloudways and DigitalOcean and I’ve been using A records to point to the individual hoster so I can easily switch. Last month I thought I was clever and just made tongfamily.com a…
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dev: 1Password cli only works online
Well, I’ve been having fun with developer tools for the past week, so documenting some of them before I descend (yet again!) into the depths of patent writing hell. 1Password CLI Well, 1Password is making some great improvements as they evolve from an influential end user store you passwords into an enterprise developer focused system…
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ai: OpenWebUI Missing Mac Manual with Ollama and ComfyUI notes v1.9 2025-04-11
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. So here are my notes for using the various features that are on the…