Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

I finally had a chance to read the Comcast latest agreement and it just reinforces why these kinds of contracts are just super unfair. The net is that you literally have no idea or any control as to when and how they raise prices. Geez, I can’t believe people are forced to sign this. But…

Well, if you have an older Tesla Model 3 from say the golden age of 2019, then there are some things that you have to get to keep up with the new Model 2021. Here’s a short list from two great vendors, Evannex and Abstract Ocean of things on top of the basics, I’ve mentioned…

Well, we’ve had lots of variants of Smashed potatoes and they are so fine. The basic idea is that you par boil the potatoes first to get them nice and tender, then you smash them gently with the bottom of a glass so they are squished, but not pulverized. Finally, you crank the oven up…

Well, I have used the Apple Pencil with dedicated writing applications like Nebo but it is a pain to copy and paste. So I fired up the pencil for the first thing is turning Scribble on in the settings menu. What is not obvious is how to get started. What you do is to dismiss…

It used to be that any Apple remote would just work with an Apple TV. But sometime in the distant past, Apple added some like security. So if you for instance lose your remote you have to manually pair it to your Apple TV. So what if you are an idiot and forgot your remote…

Ok folks can mean a bunch of different things when they talk about marketing. And One of Graces friends asked an overview and help on interview questions. It’s actually a broad topic since people mean so many different thing when they say marketing. I’m definitely no expert by tl;dr when we say marketing we can…

Well, now that I have all of these devices, it is pretty complicated to figure out how to get Hey Siri working properly across all of them. First, this actually works really well with a “cloud” of HomePod Minis at home, It is pretty crazy that you can literally whisper “hey siri” and something hears…

Well, one of these days, I’ll move my main site to the JAMStack, but for now, I’m still on WordPress for tong family.com and one of the cool things that jetpack gives you for free is cross posting to Facebook, Twitter, Linked and Tumblr I think. As an example right now I probably the same…

OK, some quick and silly notes, mainly to clear out my many tabs open but some random thoughts On the latest keyboard love… Varmilo VA87-Mac vs. Keychron K2 and Corsair. I’ve got to say, I’ve been liking the wireless keyboard, the Keychron K2 but I’ve been finding it a bit flaky in that it will…

Ok I feel like Apple HomeKit is so close to greatness, but it’s like all the piece parts are there but it lacks the now traditional Apple let’s hide the complexity. But the idea that any iOS or Siri device can be the universal remote to control your smart home is really great. Related to…