Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, well, Seattle just suffered a historic three days of high temperatures (in June?) of over 100F. Portland hit a record 117F. To give you a sense of how hot that is, the Las Vegas record is 117F/48C so that is awesomely high. So what can you do in this kind of temperature. In Seattle,…

OK, we have two of these Facebook Portals (and yes, I put a blanket over it when I’m not using it :-), but it has been a decent Zoom device and also for meetings because of the automatic zoom feature. If you do have one of these though, beware that they do silent updates of…

Nothing like pretending like it is Hawaii in the Pacific Northwest, our little neck of the woods hit 107F or 42C which is really unusual, but that doesn’t stop the work, so I hit a bunch of git lfs bugs again. As a reminder, if you get the dreaded “files should be pointer but weren’t”…

Well, there are a few tricks here that these hots days in Seattle (99F/37C) yesterday and a projected (102F/39C) today have taught me about making WiFi work well enough outside the house. The main trick is that inside our house, I’ve been using minimum RSSI. The idea is pretty simple the so called Station (we…

OK, I really don’t get Bluetooth pairing for this Corsair Dark Core RGB Pro. I just tried to repair it with a different laptop and no matter how many times I powered it on and off it just never worked. I even tried what they claim is a reset which is holding the middle button…

OK, there are some great deals on Amazon today (and a lot of junk). One thing that I need a bunch of are: Eufy Solo IndoorCam C24s which are $39 but $29 with a coupon which actually captures a 3MP image (which is about 1.5x bigger image). Finally if you are sure you don’t need…

OK, as the pandemic quarantine is ending, a quick review of the headphones that I have. With Apple Spatial coming out and lossless as well, I’ve hooked up my headphones to the very best that there can be: Sennheiser HD-650. These are my most expensive headphones at $400 and they sound it. They are open-backed…

OK, so I’ve finally spent the hour to go through every USB C cable I have and try to figure out how fast they are and how much power they can deliver. Digital Trends does a pretty good job of explaining the speed “crisis” which is basically that the USB C connector has literally half…

Well, I can’t really figure out why I need a Tesla Model S Plaid or any 1,000 hp plus car that goes 0-60 in 1.99 seconds, but I sure do want one, if only because the idea of a carbon wrapped rotor spinning at 20,000 rpm to go 200 mph is such a cool idea.…

OK, normally, I don’t use vim windows, they are really tiles, so I normally use separate windows and tools like Divvy and Hammerspoon to move windows around. Still, it is sometimes good to be able to see multiple windows particularly if you want to copy and paste between them. I haven’t spent much time learning…

OK, I have some old MP3 songs that I wanted to (finally!) get into Apple Music. After realizing that some things like iMovie need DRM-free content, I was motivated. I had been using MP3Tag to do this work, but it has become a paid application, so looking for open source tools that would manipulate these…

Well, this was quite the experiment, but instead of carry my trusty Sony A7R4 to a wedding, I wanted to see if you can really shoot an entire wedding, publish the photos and make a nice wedding video all on a single iPhone 12 Pro Max. And the answer is that except for some gotchas…

OK, here is a weird one. One of the (many!) nice features of T-mobile is that in addition to their awesome Netflix On Us partnership (you get a $17 off the $24 Netflix premium plan) is their one hour of free WiFi and unlimited texting, iMessage, Whatsapp, etc on Gogo US flights which are on…

Well, I suppose it is a long to expect a computer to work, but my MacBook Pro 2016 is five years old and has been super reliable. However, today I plugged it into my trusty CalDigit ThunderBolt 3+ docking station and the CalDigit would not power up. Usually, when I plug it in, the blue…

This is a new mode (at least for me). So for instance, if you want to add say a # in front of a bunch of lines, you can do a redo over and over, but the visual mode is a nice way to think about it, you just hit ctrl-v and then your selection…

OK, I got this all setup, I’m now using an old DAC (from the iPhone 3G days!) that is a high quality one, this goes from USB to the DAC and then from there to 3.5mm to a banana plug to my Sennheiser 650s. If you want to try thi stuff: It is actually hard…

Wow, Lo & Sons makes some of the best bags and backpacks around. Wirecutter likes their Hakuba which is something that a new professional is going to need (hint!). And, we’ve had the OG for years and it has held up really well. The current OG 2 is just slightly refined with the laptop case…

If you have a MacOS then with v5.6.4 at least in June, they’ve added a bunch of really useful features. I don’t know whether this works on Windows or Chrome, but presume there are lots of differences between platforms. Also, this kind of stuff eats a lot of CPU. Right now I’m running using 65%…

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…