Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

OK, these professional applications (GarageBand is really just a cut down version of a pro application) are incredibly confusing. The main problem is that the overall user model is hard to understand, so the whole thing seems super mysterious. It would be so much useful if they just gave an explanation of how the internals…

Well, I rebuilt my Mac completely last month because I thought I had horrible problems with Zoom and crashes. It turns out that it probably wasn’t that at all, but actually something much simpler which was that the connection was not seated properly with the camera. But since I rebuilt it, I kind of just…

I almost never have the open time to get on a busy Mac and I don’t want to an update things without checking things first, but if you do have a setup that involved an Intel MacBook Pro 256GB and a Samsung Q60 monitor, here are some notes on things to do: The Samsung Q60…

OK, I’m an idiot and did not realize the big transitions happening with PowerShell, it explains why a bunch of the Google commands don’t work like Remove-Service. The short story is that Powershell v5 is kept for compatibility reasons, but Microsoft has moved on to Powershell Core which is a cross-platform version that is Powershell…

OK, well, I’ve finally made some progress on figuring out the best way to make this work. There are a bunch of small things that make things work better. The biggest one is figuring out how to store repos and where to run commands for the development group that is mainly MacOS/Linux but needs some…

OK, a very nerdy post I admit, but recently in trying to manage lots of images photogrammetry and gaming engines, it’s pretty clear that a lot of things breakdown, but here are some notes to help the “cheap” startup folks: If you have lots of binary data like images and videos that don’t change alot,…

Yikes, I had such a great experience installing first the DJI Phantom Pro and then the DJI Mavic Pro, that I thought this should all be easy after four more years of development how wrong I was. Here are some installation notes on a el cheapo drone that runs open source Ardu Pilot and a…

Ok, I think this might be my actual last post, but had a great conversation about Windows development with Vlad, and here is what I learned: The easiest way to work is to Remote Desktop, this is easy to get and if you are on the Mac, means that you get things that work well…

Ok, I finally wrestled this one to the ground, but it is a little complicated and unintuitive. First off, if the you have a Powershell script and it doesn’t need administrative mode, you have to run it this way. Hat tip to Raymond for this one. As should be obvious in retrospect, in WSL, you…

Well, I have to say that while I love the move to Apple Homekit for all my home automation, this little life in the pandemic world revealed some real problems with the “cheap” devices. The main problem is that some of these things demand a 2.4Ghz only network. And they don’t respond super well to…

Ok, we’ve been getting some champagne as gifts and we got a strange one today. It had a huge steel clamp on the top of it as well as a shrink wrap. It is a metal clamp on top and the cork itself is really compressed like 2-3mm so that you can’t just slide it…

Well, the documentation and guides on how to do this are pretty horrible, but I think I’ve finally figured out all the tradeoffs if you want to have a modern development environment (eg Linux) and also use Windows applicatiions because there are some, like Unreal Engine or Airsim, which simply don’t run well without the…

OK, this is the hopefully final post, it turns out that I also use symlinks extensively and this is not enabled by default with Windows so a simple ln -s myfile otherfile fails, to make this work you have to do three things: You have to enable developer mode in Windows, this is in Settings/Update…

Well, here are some more notes about living with Windows. I do have to say, what pain to get this running, but the path of just using git-bash seems to work with a few caveats that are really annoying, but here are some tips, but I was getting a very obscure error message. It was…

One of the cool features on most modern LG devices (like our LG CX from 2020) is that it has Screen shift which is used to prevent burning of fixed elements like with a monitor or a TV logo. The only problem is that this is not free, it also cuts off some of the…

Well, I’ve been experimenting with quite a few USB C adapters. And this is the first one that started to burn up. It is $25 from Geddie that is USB C to USB A, it has a USB C input for power, and HDMI input. It worked fine when I plugged it in the first…

Ok, while I like Apple Homekit for its privacy, it definitely is a little confusing when you are managing multiple homes and lots of devices. So here are some notes: 1. As John says, if you move say an Eufy camera, there is no UI to remove them. So you have to factory reset them…