Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Wow, talk about a nice silent update. Literally at 1 AM last night, I discovered that my iPhone with version 14.6 got Dolby Atmos support. This is complicated techie jargon for a more expansive sound. Sound engineers now can place sources in a 3D space and then through the miracle of computational audio, this sound…

Well, I’m still wanting that Tesla Roadster with spacex package but the Model S Plaid+ is pretty incredible. It apparently set the record for a production car Alon the quarter mile driven by no other than Jay Leno at 9.247 seconds. And they set an unofficial record at Laguna Seca reportedly at 1:29.9 which beat…

I sort of wish that the keyboard shortcuts of jupyter were more like Vi, but that is just me, here are some useful defaults from the standard “meta” editing, that is moving around cells, but not editing in them. Also the shortcuts listed are somewhat different at least for my Jupyter 3.0. You can modify…

OK, I can’t help it, I’ve been posting about keyboards for a while and I finally have the “entire” universe of keyboards particularly now that I’ve been using the Unicomp with the buckling spring (the old IBM PC keyboard). So if I were king for a day, here is what I would recommend for a…

OK, I know the pandemic is ending, but the movie habit never really dies, while there is always a plethora, some quick notes and reviews in order of what’s the best value: Kanopy. Like OverDrive and Libby, your local library is a huge resource and you never even really need to go there. With Kanopy,…

WiFi Guide and Troubleshooter for Tesla Vehicles – TeslaTap — Read on teslatap.com/articles/wifi-guide-and-troubleshooter-for-tesla-vehicles/ Well our Model 3 used to connect fine on our mixed 2.4/5G network but lately it seems to fail to login. It works fine on a 2.4G network. Probably my ongoing nightmares with setting in unifi. For some reason sometimes particularly with…

OK, I’ve been using JupyterLab really extensively over the last few days and mainly with keyboard shortcuts. They are super hard to find and remember mainly because like Vi itself there isn’t a central place where they all go (except maybe help). So here for everyone else is a list. First an aside, actually figuring…

If you are on the bleeding edge have a 8K display and want to connect it to a 4Kp120 video source like the new Xbox One it is not going to work. There is a problem with the chip inside the Denon X3700H AVR that blanks the screen. The megaloth conglomerate that owns Denon and…

OK, here’s a simple and convenient thing for you. If you enable Spotlight, then ⌘-Spacebar tapped gets you to the simple search bar. I use it all the time on the Mac to find things. You enable this with Settings ↠ Spotlight and on MacOS Big Sur on the lower left is a Keyboard Shortcuts…

Sometimes revolutions happen so slowly you don’t really notice, but after 30 years, it’s pretty clear that every generation has its own favorite desktop productivity tools. Yes, Microsoft Office (which gave me my start in life!) is still the dominant product that is the default for most businesses, but the leading edge keeps shifting. And,…

OK, spent the day making JupyterLab really work for me. Key to this has been keyboard shortcuts. They are so different on Colab, Deepnote and even between JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook. But there is hope with two cool finds: Vivaldi is a Chromium based browser, so it can accept Chrome Store extensions but it is…

Mike also repaid that I should listen Kara and Scott’s Podcast called Pivot, he’s definitely right about that. It is a great example of having two folks do a great job talking about technology. Got to love it. Also for those of you who like to have ink stained hands, some great lessons for you.…

Stay true to yourself, I’ve been thinking about this. Although this is pretty limiting but it sounds like he’s a perfect Cloud Computing tech guy 🙂 I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed,…

Ok, AirPlay 2 let’s you run multiple speakers. So with so many different variants that Apple ships. By experiment. Here’s what I found is Airplay 2 multiroom compatible. You can tell this by pulling down on the control center and clicking on the airplay icon and seeing when you click on an output if a…

I had a great conversation with my old friend Mike and it reminded me that I had not congratulate New Zealand for defending the America’s Cup in March 2021, it seems like a world away that you can run an entire race during COVID-19, but hats off to them. It also reminded me that I…

This actually worked fine for me for a long time, it’s the new framework inside hypervisor. But suddenly I could no long pull docker images. Turns out that Reddit has the answer, if you flip this on, it makes disk access slower and also break networking, so probably do not want to use it. You…

This has been the most embarrassing thing lately, we have a great video embedded in Google Slides and it just won’t play. I have PTSD from the many PowerPoint presentations in the last century when you were all queued up to do this and something would just break. Well, this morning when it broke yet…

Ok, there have been an amazing set of new products coming out of Apple and we got the first AirTag just as they were coming out. They are $99 for four of them and we’ve had them now for a few weeks and most importantly took a trip with them. Here are the thoughts: The…

Wow, this is incredibly easy, thank you once again Internet. But IGeeksBlog has a great guide for how to do this. The long story short is that we use Apple Music as part of the Apple One bundle and not Spotify, but sometimes, we get a Spotify playlist. Before it was complicated process of transferring…

Well, I’ve had two DigitalOcean droplets running WordPress for the last two years and I basically haven’t paid them any attention. So, don’t be that person. Either move to a server-less installation where someone else is doing the work. With DigitalOcean, you can create your own droplet which is their term for a virtual server.…

OK, I switched to using Google Contacts mainly because with Superhuman, you are forced to use it with Google Mail. When I was on Apple Mail, I actually used iCloud contacts (more private), but now I’ve had to import all my contacts into Google. That alone was a chore because there are some limits on…

Particularly, when you are finding your way in a new city, one question is how safe is the neighborhood. The best thing to do is to ask a local of course, but if you don’t have anyone that you know. One trick is to look at the crime in your city and then compare it…

Well, after our first trip in ages, I had forgotten how useful Sidecar is. This lets an iPad act as a second screen for your Mac. I had nearly forgotten how to use It, but it isn’t too complicated, if you turn on wifi it just works over that, and with macOS Big Sur, you…

I’m having real trouble “clearing my tabs.” I have this rule that every time I learn something new, I leave it open as a tab on my Mac, phone or iPad. I’m probably right now at over 100 unposted items, so it is pretty out of control. I think I’m changing my strategy to just…

OK, I’ve already posted on this, but it’s a little tricky to figure out how to setup up Google Workspace if you are just doing it for personal reasons and don’t really want everyone in your household to pay $6/month for mail, but you do want vanity domains to work properly. Here is the update…

I get asked a lot what presentation format to use when talking with venture capitalists. Well, I have used many different forms, but it never hurts to first map it to the Sequoia Pitch template. Or course these days, who really even needs to have a pitch or a product, pretty much whispering “bitcoin” will…

OK, if you the basic Mac keyboard shortcuts like ⌘ (Command) keys like ⌘-X for copy to the clipboard or ⌘-N to get a new window then you are already doing pretty well, but for the level 2 wizards, here are some shortcuts that I find really useful but I have a hard time remembering:…

OK, this whole 18 months of COVID-19 isolation has gotten me to buy lots of keyboards. I just got my latest one which is the Unicomp Mini M, this uses the original IBM PC bucking spring action. It is supposed to feel like the original IBM PC keyboard which I remember fondly. The folks at…

Apple has really figured out the magic of integrating hardware, software and services. We just got the AirTag and I can’t believe how simple it is to start using it as you can see in unboxing videos: The biggest trick is that you have to buy a case for the thing, I kind of wish…

In the modern world, it is not easy just to send someone a digital gift. As an example, for Lucas who is headed off to New York, we wanted to send the quintessential 1980s movie about geeks living in the city, After Hours, but how do you do that in the modern world. Well, with…