Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

I’ve actually been using 1Password for five years now and some of my machines used the older synchronization system with Dropbox. One of the bugs I’ve encountered is that even if you disable these synchronizers, the password on the Mac version of 1Password stays stuck on the old password in those shared storage systems. Even…

It just seems like I’m more and more sensitive to the position of my hands on a keyboard. I can’t actually type in bed or lying down anymore. So I’ve learned to sit up. But I’ve also gotten a bunch of new keyboards and I haven’t had a wrist rest or pad on them. In…

We were recently watching a dance concert that was broadcast on the web and, man, is it complicated to try to get that to project on an Apple TV to see on the big screen. The big problem here is that there are two kinds of sharing that an Apple TV knows how to handle.…

Well, these are really powerful, but incredibly hard to understand. It’s taken me five years to get a sense of how to really use these is to first understand at an architectural level what is really happening inside Git, then it makes sense how this whole thing works. It’s taken me five years to really…

Ok, the ideal thing is that if you are writing some up intellectual property (IP) documents for say patents or papers, you need a good base to do this. Right now, I’m trying to set up a workflow that is efficient and easy for a patent attorney for instance to understand. So here is the…

OK, I thought I had beat this one, but now it looks like there are more issues, but in tuning our Unifi network I was working on two issues: Apple devices sometimes will not connect. If you turn on all the goodies with Wifi, then iOS clients will suddenly report that they can’t connect to…

Ok with those preliminaries out of the way how do you get a GPU instance up and running and have it work easily. There are a few steps. The main issue are when you are thinking about this that there are 3.5 different ways to do things these days and it’s super confusing what the…

Well in the world of Infrastructure as Code, the idea is that you try not to use the graphical interface and instead use the command line. Put it in scripts and other tools. So here are the basics for doing this with Google Cloud Platform. The nice thing is that command completion works really well,…

It does seem that GCP is somewhat simpler than AWS (but not as simple as Digital Ocean) for sure. We just got some GCP Credits through their startup program and it is a little confusing how to get it and use it, so some notes: A startup can sign up for their startup program. They…

This is one of the more annoying problems. With iOS you can set dark mode for the browser, but not for Mac. Instead, there are two utilities that cost money to do this. Dark Eyes for instance only works for five sites. The only solution seems to be to pay or sometime certain sites can…

Ok, I spent way too much time like hours on this bug. But I’ve gotten to the point where I can fork a repo and create a new website just by adding to new files with Unsplash. But I hit a really confusing problem that drove me crazy. The problem is that netlify.toml. We are…

Well, there are so many ways to use server less functions and AWS Lambdas are the biggest way. If you are deploying these, there are also literally a dozen ways to do that. The simplest thing to do is to upload the Lambda and then use the AWS console to test it, but it doesn’t…

Ok, this has to be so confusing, but there are times when you are in a bash script and you want some variables to be substituted and some that are not. The easy case if when you want double quote inside a double quote, this is used when you are going to feed that string…

Well, it’s been a long time, but git has got to be amongst the most mysterious of all software tools. I’ve spent the last five years going through tutorials and most of them are obsolete. The git command is undergoing really significant improvement and lots of the confusing things are because the base tutorials get…

Ok, more stuff for developers, this is about getting Typescript to run with Vim. While many people are using VSCode, I guess the muscle memory and speed of Vi (vee-eye not vaay) are just too much an attraction, so here is as how to get the environment working right. Installing typescript This is pretty simple…

Ok, some of my favorites, Ti Pang is awesome, basically braise any kind of pork in soy sauce and sugar. What can go wrong! I guess the technical term is braised Chinese Braise Pork Shank, but I also knew it as Ti Pang 蹄膀  or affectionately Sweet Hoof 糖蹄. The recipe is pretty simple, you…

Ok, three incredibly annoying things finally tracked down early this morning: Unifi Intrusion Protection blocks Github SSH connections The net of it is that Intrusion Prevention has been great (at least I haven’t seen many ill effects except this one). It makes Github basically unusable. I’ve been having horrible problems with running GitHub commands. If…

Ok, today was a day of little things, of update hell and trying to keep a Smart home up and going plus some tips: Unifi. Make sure that you turn *off* automatic firmware updates. While you will be getting bug fixes, the code is pretty unstable right now. Basically, I took an update silently and…

OK, I have not really had to use Office on the desktop in a *very* long time. Most of my editing is just with Google Workspace these days, but thanks to the Microsoft Alumni Network, we do get a $99 subscription per year as part of being that group. So here are the quick instructions…