Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Well both our ASUS PB278s seems a bit flaky. No matter what I try I can’t get one of them to reliable turn on. It sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I tried the HDMI connection and the DisplayPort and rebooting the Mac. When I change it for a Benq 32 it works fine. Both of…

OK here are the crazy list of things that my three “Just in from Windows” friends, Mark, John and Dave are having. Hopefully both are loving that M1 MacBooks (yes, I’m jealous, trying to hold out for the next generation coming this year, but I don’t know!). So here are notes from the many phone…

Argh two Google problems today. The first is really annoying, I downloaded an extension that would force Dark Mode on Chrome, but when I uninstalled it, the backgrounds were still DARK. Argh! I tried changing the Dark mode on the Mac and also changing the default Theme. It turns out that plug in actually turns…

Well, this is a truly nerdy post, but I just read that with Superhuman worth hundreds of millions, everyone is back to building the Superhuman of X keyboard shortcuts as the way to get common applications faster. I completely agree with that and those of us who have used vi forever sure know that is…

OK, suppose that you are too paranoid to get on an airplane and instead decide that any trip within 1,200 km of your home city are fair game for a road trip. What do you need to make the trip as safely as possible. Here are some notes 🙂 Safety Stuff: Of Snow tires and…

This has been bothering me for literally a year. I can’t seem to get rid of these relentless emails from Microsoft Teams. If I want to see random water cooler chatter I would ask for it. Finally, the latest email from them tells you exactly how to shut it off… Update your email preferences in…

Well, I have NordVPN with it’s Cybersec ad blocking and also run Safari with UBlock and while it seems to block some ads, a bunch more seem to appear. So to welcome in 2021, let’s see how to figure out how effective these are. I normally use open source blockers like UBlock origin or KaBlock!…

These two things are tiny, but they are very helpful. If you have some photos that you don’t want to transmit everywhere, but still want to keep them around, you can hide them. The interface is really hidden (no pun intended, but here is what you need to do) iOS Devices you Share to Hide…

Well, I’ve tried a number of other hosted Jupyter environments from Google AI Platform Notebook to Saturn and I keep coming back to Google Colab for one reason mainly: We don’t have things that are that complex (yet!), so simplicity is key and Colab is just so simple to use with everything you need already…

OK, a quick report on my life with dongles and other attachments for MacBooks. Suffice to say these dongles definitely have a spotty record for me. Most of the time they seem to work fine if you leave them plugged in, but it’s detection that seems like the problem (and the occasional burnout, see below).…

Well, I seem to have bought just a boatload of different keyboards, microphones and mice in 2020. The first world problem of staying at home for the last seven (?!!) months have led me to become the foremost expert on various junk like this. so here’s a flash review of what seems to work and…

Well, it’s probably a testament to Apple hardware design that I regularly end up with machines that are perfectly functional but no longer get updates. A good example is the Mac Mini 2011. It is nearly 10 years old yet still runs just fine for basic tasks like typing this blog entry, but it is…

Well, turns out that I had never actually written down how I made a Podcast in the first place and of course I completely forgot how I did it, so here are notes that I’ve recovered: GarageBand. I mainly used this because it is free with the Mac. Lots of people end up using Audacity,…

Since getting our Tesla’s it’s been massive road trip city. Previous with gasoline cars a drive of 10 hours would leave me complete exhausted. Pre-Tesla Records The first really long trip sans parents I ever took was from NJ to Hilton Head Island. That was an epic 757 miles with two people splitting the driving.…

I have always though of Namecheap as an inexpensive registrar with an amazing search function for finding domain names. Their beast mode let’s you browse literally hundreds of top level domains and they automatically generate names for you by adding prefixes like “try” or by deleting suffixes. But there are quite a few other things…

Well we’ve got everyone in our extended family air filters. We ended up getting a HEPA filter made by BlueAir called the Blue Pure 211+ for $300 at Amazon. I can’t actually tell if it works, but it is quiet. The other company that has gotten buzz has been Molekule. They have an additional filter…

I don’t know if this will work for other displays but I’ve never been able to get an LG to scan properly. This has worked without adjustment for most Samsung television that I’ve used. While some folks on Reddit say to turn Pixel Shift off, this is called Screen Shift and lives in Settings >…

Well it’s been nearly a year since I’ve done a podcast, but Paul asked me for a link so I thought I would start again for 2021. If you want to see the test casts I’ve been doing, they are up on Apple Podcasts. For some reason when I did an automatic distribution on Anchor.fm,…

Well, I finally tried a way more expensive docking station. It is the $220 CalDigit TS3 Plus at Amazon and is way more than the typical $30 USB C Dongle and $30 powered USB hub, but it was getting so frustrating having intermittent connections. The CalDigit TS3 Plus is really pro grade stuff and comes…