Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well continuing the basically weekly podcast. I skipped Sunday because it was Valentine’s day, but hopefully will stay on the every Sunday track. The main thing is that I go through the newest posts and then go through the back catalog of posts (I have 5,000 of them, so this should work for a looong…

Ok, some quick news for WordPress geeks: One of the great things with WordPress is the ability to publicize your posts automatically on Facebook, Twitter, etc. This is buried deep in the marketing tab of your website, but the problem is that LinkedIn keeps saying it doesn’t connect. It’s a known bug with WP-Calypso probably…

Well, continuing the basically weekly podcast on Anchor.fm. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, Tunein or Stitcher Podcast as well or search for “Rich Tong” in your Podcast application. I skipped Sunday because it was Valentine’s day, but hopefully will stay on the every Sunday track. The main thing is that I go through…

OK, I’m off making my weekly podcast show and I’ve finally figure out how to turn off all the echos and other things that are on in GarageBand, but here are some notes: When you create a new GarageBand, the most annoying thing are all the automatic things that are happening. First of all I…

Well time for the geek post of the week. A new feature, I’m labeling my really nerdy programming hacks. So don’t bother reading unless you have this exact problem. Command Completion Basics OK I admit it I’ve gotten kind of spoiled. One of the advances features of shells is what is called Tab Completion. This…

Tl:dr So Paul asked me for a friend, should I get a second internet provider. Things are slow at home. Most of the time probably not. Make sure it’s not a problem inside then upgrade to the fastest you can afford do watch fir expensive data caps. Decoder ring The decoder ring for the below…

I can’t believe I just spent 20 minutes of my life reading about wiper blade replacements but like anything with tesla might as well learn it all. The short story is that you can get various 26″ and 19″ blades but the issue is the adapter to get them on the tesla. Some require clipping…

Well, if like me, you are trying to find a vaccine for your parents, then here is the place to look. Yes, you can click relentlessly on a website but that sure does seem like a waste of time, so while I’m doing that, the other alternative is to learn a little bit about computers…

The latest for the week ending February 6. The top 10 posts read to you! And here is an embedded player for this, or checkout Anchor.fm, but you can search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, in your Tesla or other cars via TuneIn and Stitcher as well a bunch of others (see…

Welcome to the February 6 episode of Rich’s Tongfamily Tips, Tricks and Traps in Technology. You can always see the written posts on https://richtong.org, but included here are: Understanding Robinhood, Gamestop and settlements Anaconda is a great virtual environment with a big leak Distributing your podcast manually when Anchor.fm doesn’t Moving to Jupyter, Python and…

Well, Paul asked me a very good question today, I don’t understand why Robinhood had to stop trading Gamestop GME shares. Sadly, a lot of the commentary has been pretty confusing about it, but I had a chance to study for the registered representative class about 1.5M years ago so at least I sort of…

Ok, I don’t this is well documented and it has been causing me headaches for months, but here it is: If you are using a virtual environment, a very common one is Anaconda or miniconda. This let’s you install python packages on your machine and switch between environments. Another package like this is pipenv which…

I started using Anchor.fm as an easy way to publish Podcasts and have a place to host the content. It is pretty incredibly, but they do all that for free. So all you need to do is sign up for it and then get started by either uploading audio (I use GarageBand and then export)…

Well, I’ve had two events over where Excel (or Google Sheets) is just too small and/or not maintainable, so the question is what we can do about it. For instance if you have over a million rows of data (looking at your Brian) or where there is lots of logics (looking at you https://restart.us) There…

Thanks to Dave and John, they reminded me of all the hard things that Windows users face when they first move to the Mac. Both have new M1 MacBook Air. This is a blazing fast machine but it is definitely different from Windows. So here’s a quick starter guide on how to get there quickly.…

Ok, in the days of COVID, it seems strange that the march of high-tech, high-end and unaffordable gizmos keeps coming. But, an amazing number of companies are shipping some incredible products that are really pushing the boundaries. So this is like an issue of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” plus “Lifestyles of the Rich…

Ok with Apple it’s usually pretty obvious how to get an update done. You just set things to auto update and then Apple TV or a Mac or an iOS device. But how would you make a HomePod update itself. That was super unclear to me. That’s like a lot of the Home features and…

Well, there is always the need for a nice looking logo, so if you are starting a company how do you get one quickly that looks decent. There are a couple of choices that I’ve used over the years in order of simplicity: Use a logotype with a cool font. My favorite was actually ignition…

So a good buddy is installing a new system and has some great questions. There is nothing like a new install to remind me of the FAQs… First of all the base installation is a Unifi Dream Machine Pro and a Unifi FlexHD AP plus a Unifi G4 Doorbell. So a nice setup. The Unifi…

OK that’s a lot about keyboards once again. So this is all about cleaning your gunky keyboard. I’ve had a WASD CODE v2 mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Blue keys forever. Ok, well since 2015. And both the shift key and the period key have been sticking. And, I confess, I’ve never actually cleaned the…

OK it was mainly procrastination, but I finally did a new Podcast. I had actually lost all the GarageBand files, so I had no idea how to set it up. There will be a separate post on that, but in the mean time, you should see it shortly on. Apple and other places hopefully if…

Here the latest from https://richtong.org including: Some more tips and tricks for moving from Windows to the Mac.  There are lots of differences, so here’s a decoder ring. Voice phishing. Hopefully you are not that person who answers the call and loses your bank account. here is what to do about it. Moving to JAMStack.…

OK, so now that the initial transition is over, what are the next set of Gotchas that I encountered. Some a deep and others are silly, but all are useful at least for me: Mount issues One of the cool things about the way that latest Hugo Modules works is that it allows virtual mounting…

Ok, the next raft of questions this week from my Windows-moving-to-Mac friends: How do you run incognito mode which is called Private Window. Well, on Windows, if you use Chrome, you actually have to edit the shortcut. Chrome makes this really hard, so you either have to create an Apple Script which is horrible or…

Well, I’ve had about two weeks on this new Keychron K2 v2 on the boards now. This is a very inexpensive $79 keyboard that is wireless and works with the Mac which is nice. Net, net, for most ordinary humans, I would say it’s the right keyboard if you want something way better than the…

Well this has been a higher and higher priority project. I’ve got a bunch of experience with WordPress, but keeping up a server is a lot of work and all those plugins. Alex turned me onto Hugo, a static site generator. It is super fast and most importantly, it just works out of a Git…

Just happened, they know your name, phone, address, your SSN and last four of your bank account and the call had a caller ID for your bank. And they call you repeatedly on your mobile phone. Argh! You have been Voice Phished! The problem is that VOIP you can easily fake the caller id, so…

Well, I’ve been delaying getting a new watch for a relatively long time. We started with a Series 1 and got them for the kids. But the short battery life and not needing notifications plus hoe slow it was was a limitation. The new focus on Health has changed that plus having cellular as a…

OK so this is a Monday question, for a long time I’ve just wanted Emoji’s inside Vim, so what are the considerations to make this work: Why you want everything in UTF-8 First of all just to demystify, an emoji to a computer is just another Unicode character. Unicode is a huge character set that…

OK, this is a strange bug that you need to watch out for. With all this work-from-home, I’ve had trouble on one machine getting onto our VPN. And while we’ve not had much trouble with Zoom and so forth. We are lucky to have 300Mbps/20Mbps upload with Comcast. However last night, suddenly Zoom really slowed…