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net: Google Drive Sharing dual layer
OK, so we have Google Drive for sharing things and man has it gotten complicated. The problem is that sharing is more restricted now and the default is that you cannot share things with non-workspace members. It is confusing because when you try to share with someone, you set it and then it doesn’t take,…
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pod: Rich and Steve Talk Deepseek
Well, I somehow forgot all about podcast publishing, things get too busy, but now things from way back in February are getting caught up. Here is one where Steve Suarez and I talked about Deepseek R1. A little dated now in September, but for posterity
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dev: ubuntu 22.04 google chrome and asdf strangeness
Well, asdf, direnv and the plug asdf-direnv are wonderful when they work, but very mysterious when they don’t. As of today, you need to use my build of asdf-direnv and you also have to do some work to setup it up if you are on a out of date Linux Ubuntu box. Here are the…
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dev: The pain of moving from wsn to ws fixing ComfyUI Desktop, asdf
Sam showed me years ago a great way to organize your local machine. Basically you create workspace directory ws and then you put git, data, cache and everything else you need to build for that project. For a long time ws was my home GitHub project I keep at richtong but lately we’ve been so…
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mac: No space because of Time Machine hidden in Restricted Files
I had totally forgotten that I had setup one of my machines with Time Machine. Most of the time it has no impact, but when you are trying to download 500GB of LLM models it makes a difference. Time Machine is supposed to be smart about local snapshots, but when you delete a lot of…
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git: tag overwrites, recursing submodules and fetching them
Well this is really advanced stuff, but with large mono repos you really want things to stay in sync, so here are some tricks:
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dev: git submodule magic
Well, git submodules are useful and frustrating at the same time, since we have literally a few dozen of these, I finally spent time figuring out what was wrong and it comes down to two commands and making sure you do not have error: Now that this is set, by default you are in detached…
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mac: Text to Speech and Speech to Text
As part of their accessibility offerings they have a ton of cool but hidden features. here are my favorites Clock speaking every 30 minutes Apple has made it really hard to find settings, they are buried everywhere, but in System Settings > Control Center > Clock > Clock Options you can select Announce the Time…
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tvl: I’m a Data Roaming idiot
Ok this is so silly but if you are traveling v through SE Asia here are some tips:
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ai: Exo for distributed AI
This is a cool tool that lets you jam multiple Macs (or other machines together) and run inference in a circle with a project called EXO It does require a bit of setup. I tried to do a pipx install of it, but it is not packaged that way. You also can’t do a `pipx…
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ai: ComfyUI and Video Generation Missing Mac Manual v1.6 2025-04-27
OK, my previous post on Open WebUI was getting long, so here is a getting a little long and while it covers ComfyUI integration, the bigger topic of using ComfyUI is scattered all over the winds. So if you just want to get ComfyUI to work, here’s the missing manual for that. Some of this…
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pod: London AI Hub January 13 2025
Well we had another one of these great events and it was so good to hear from everyone there and here is the Zoom. It’s a little ugly and messy but gets the points across which are: See it here on YouTube Or check it out as a Podcast on Spotify or listen on Apple…
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inet: Google Drive Storage Counts Get Real
For a long time I’ve wondered how Google Drive does it, no matter how many Google Slides I store with no matter how many images, the storage count against me is always 137 bytes or something. They only count the pointer and not the storage. I woke up this morning to the warning, “you are…
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mac: Getting great Text to speech
While there are better systems out there of course, nothing is better than free and what the Mac has isn’t bad. It is a complete pain to setup, but basically, you have to:
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wp: Removing local backups with Updraft on WordPress
I’ve been a faithful users of Updraft for a long time, but because I haven’t used shared hosting in a long time, the backup files have not been a problem (and don’t take much space), but Inmotion has an automatic searching tool that looks for backup files and they bang on you if you have…
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dev: Getting rid of Git LFS
This thing is a bit of a pain, it is very expensive on Github although they’ve lowered the price artificially, it is $5 for 50GB of Git LFS storage. As long as you keep your files less than 100MB you shouldn’t have a problem, but how do you get rid of it once you have…
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web: Need an A Record for SOA propagation
OK, I was too clever by half and it bit me. Basically, I have lots of different hosting providers, I’ve used Bluehost, Inmotion, Cloudways and DigitalOcean and I’ve been using A records to point to the individual hoster so I can easily switch. Last month I thought I was clever and just made tongfamily.com a…
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dev: 1Password cli only works online
Well, I’ve been having fun with developer tools for the past week, so documenting some of them before I descend (yet again!) into the depths of patent writing hell. 1Password CLI Well, 1Password is making some great improvements as they evolve from an influential end user store you passwords into an enterprise developer focused system…
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ai: OpenWebUI Missing Mac Manual with Ollama and ComfyUI notes v1.9 2025-04-11
Well, Open WebUI is an incredible project that provides a nice graphical front end for local AI development, but the documentation is lacking. You can figure some things out by looking at the documentation, but mainly it is trial and error. So here are my notes for using the various features that are on the…
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tel: T-Mobile to US Mobile porting and Warp to Darkstar transfer
Well, we are about half T-Mobile and half US Mobile now and here are some things to know. When you are porting, make sure you figure out turning off porting protection. Watch Companion Plans Since you don’t care about the number it is easier to try to cancel the plan Transferring between networks One cool…
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gw: Adding aliases with Google Workspace
I don’t really know why they’ve made this so incredibly hard, but if you have a startup and want to save a little cash, you can forward rich@coolstartup.com to rich@gmail.com and all your mail there arrives in Gmail and you don’t have to pay for an additional account. The setup instructions predictably out of date…
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cell: Transfer T-Mobile One to US Mobile Unlimited Flex
This was a hard decision, but thanks to Mike at T-Mobile, we had a nice plan which was basically $30/month with unlimited data in the US. However as T-Mobile One degraded (first we lost unlimited data roaming so it is only 2G roaming, then it was capping of bandwidth, then capping of hotspot and finally…
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life: Credit Card Recommendations
One of the great life hacks at least in the US is figuring out what credit cards you should have. Getting a credit card early (and never using it) is one of the easy ways to get to the magical 800+ credit card rating, so here are some recommendations (by stage of life) for what…
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dev: 1Password lockout and asdf direnv get out of Jail Card
Happy New Years everyone, some quick notes on things I’ve fixed in the last two days. Nice to really clean things up. If you lose your 1Password Well, Paul lost access to his 1Password (brand new) and also to a 2FA’ed Google Workspace. Here are the notes about how this doesn’t happen to you: Untangle…
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tech: Cool things Brompton C-line and ZWO Seestar S50
Well, it’s holiday time and some things to keep an eye on. We got a Brompton bicycle over the summer (thinking we would need it at Burning Man, but sadly didn’t go). Anyway, it’s an awesome bicycle and Amex right now has a $300 off if you spend $1500 at Brompton.com so off we go.…
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sw: Passport Photos Redux and OBS Screen capture and Mac Compressor 10008 Error fixes
OK, the last 12 hours have featured lots of frustrations. Basically, we needed to get a passport photo taken and in the past its been pretty easy to get a shot done, but this latest round, they really upped the criteria, there has to be no shadows whatsoever and we ended up spending $60 just…
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pen: Christmas is Cool Pen Season!
Well every year, there are huge ups and downs, but in the end, I hope we are all grateful for what we have and have a plan for the future that makes it even better. To that end, I started to collect and use fountain pens and it has been really great doing things that…
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buy: Luggage for a Lifetime
Well, we’ve actually had pretty good luck with luggage. We mainly use the two wheeler rollers and an old eBags one has lasted 20 years (I admit about three were during the pandemic, but still). It is fraying at the edges, but having an expandable 22″ bag is just really reliable. About six years ago,…
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hw: Battle of ASM246x Controllers ZikeDrive Z666 vs Hagibis ASM246x and Cables and docks matter
Well a few months ago, I got the really terrific (but expensive at $119) ZikeDrive Z666 and it has held up well with its AM2464PD controller, with a nice 7GBps drive inside of it, it has reliably delivered really great performance with the AmorphousDiskMark, I was getting these numbers. Note that on the M4 Max,…
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dev: Ngrok + open-webui + ollama
What a great setup, you can nearly duplicate all the stuff that requires the cloud on your local machine. While open-webui really likes using docker, I have to say that the overhead is pretty big particularly when all that is really going on is the need to isolate python environments. So instead of that I’ve…