Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Sometimes, I end up having conversations that feel like it is really “turtles all the way down.” This is from the Akupara (अकूपार) of Hindu mythology that says that the world Is held up by a turtle. When you ask, well what does the turtle stand on, another turtle. It’s just turtles all the way…

Well, I’ve tried to avoid this for years, but now I have to develop and work on Windows. I first tried WSL2, Windows Subsystem for Linux, but that has just been a mess, the main problems are: The file systems are completely different, you can’t for instance write a .profile to run on Windows and…

Well, I’m embarrassed to say that I did skip the rest the PRAM and SMC step in doing all the debugging and this I seem to dimly recall I had this problem before, but some configuration file was deeply messed up and just doing this reset did the trick. I ran for a day in…

OK, I bit the bullet and wiped the hard drive and started all over with, but problems continue. I’m getting Kernel Panics when I’m plugged into the CalDigit docking station and a no name dongle. The panics are typically, “Freed zone element element has been modified” which seems like a driver problem. As an aside,…

OK, I got the two new wrist pads and here is how well they work: JEDIA Wristpad and Mouse Rest. This is nice in that it has a no slip lower surface and it is firm enough, the main problem is that on a mechanical keyboard which is pretty high, it is just not high…

I had a few goals in the last decade, one was to get fluent in Chinese enough to talk with my mom every day (check!), the other was to get back to being technical and part of that was being good enough to come up with intellectual property. Sam just pointed out that a host…

I’m probably 20 blog posts behind. The strategy here is that if I learn something new, I just leave it open as a tab in Safari, this works really well, because you can share Safari links on any Apple device, so when I want to find something old that I’ve been working on the discipline…

Ok, I admit it, I mistakenly thought there was a tie between Apple Pay and payment to the Apple App Store. Turns out these are completely unrelated. I twizzled the Apple Pay payment order to use my normal Visa card, but Apple App Store and Apple Subscriptions kept on going to a different card. Well,…

Well, I’m really confused, my most important mission critical application, Zoom, is hard crashing my MacOS, so this is a good lesson in debugging things like this, but here are the symptoms: I have an old MacBook Pro (2016) running Big Sur, it has a Logitech BRIO hooked up to it via USB 2.0 cables.…

I can’t believe we ever managed to make such a hash of cables, but to refresh everyone, back three years ago, I wrote 2018 The State of USB C Charging and then again back in 2017 USB C Cable Recommendations, so time now for another review of USB C and how to get cables and…

Had a great Zoom cocktail hour with some friends from the Midwest and I got a great list of classic spirits, I need to stock for the next time (soon!) when they can all come and visit: Buckeye Vodka. Well, I’m not quite sure how to get this, but Ohio’s number one Vodka. Got to…