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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 The setup instructions predictably out of date…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…
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wp: giving up on Cloudways SSL last straw
Well, I’m nearly through my journey, the new Digital Ocean site is working well. It is sad I couldn’t upgrade the old one, but that’s the price of bare metal. The site I’m giving up on is Cloudways. I finally navigated through most of the problems, but the one that finally was the last straw…
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usb: Best USB C Cables and Magnetic adapter for a MacBook Air
Dave asked me what to get, well, I’ve been going through USB C cables like crazy and finally have found a reasonable combination for a MacBook Air is: MacBook Air Maximum Charging with iPhone The last thing to think about is the charger size. The default MacBook Air charger is 30W, but if you get…
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wp: Redis Ubuntu Installation and PHP Opcode cache
OK, I spent a lot of time trying to figure both the Redis cache which caches various HMTL elements and the lower level PHP Opcode cache. For instance making sure there is no swap file so that Redis doesn’t thrash caching to disk instead of memory. Right now depending on the host, I’m using three…
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wp: InMotion Hosting 508 Resource Limit and VPN Blocking Cpanel
Well, I found the first issue with InMotion, I’m trying to auto post from tongfamily.com to three other servers (calvintong.com, richtong.com and richtong.org) and I got a 508 Resource limit error. I’ve never seen this before, you can look at Inmotion AMP > Cpanel > Resource Usage and it says You have reached the entry…
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wp: More headaches PHP 8.3 on DigitalOcean Ubuntu 22.04
OK, as I finally get the following configurations in order. Note that from previous experience, we need at least a 2GB RAM server to not constantly run out of memory Upgrade 22.04 to PHP 8.3 for the system How to make the PHP 8.3 work is a little complicated, first make sure it is up…
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wp: Digital Ocean Reserved IP Strangeness even if not the DNS Server, Litespeed fail, Cloudways ugh
oK, this is a strange one, so a quick note if you hit it. I’m trying to get a Digital Ocean WordPress up and no matter what I did it didn’t see to work. I”m using Netlify as the DNS Server but it would never recognize the new IP address that I had set up…
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apple: Utterly confusing sharing AirPods from a single iPhone or iPad
This is such a cool gesture, but I have to confess I simply always forget how to use it. No, you can’t find it in settings or anywhere sane like that. Even the Apple instructions are super unclear but here is exactly what to do: So that’s not too bad. What is unclear is how…
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tvl: Tessan 140W, Satechi 145W and Anker MagGo blinking and Cable Strangeness
OK, I’ve been trying to reduce my kit while traveling a lot and the Tessan 140W Universal Travel Charger seems like a wonderful thing if I can figure out how to make it work as does the Belkin 3-in-1 Travel charger with the same issues. Tessan 140W Universal Travel Charger: Wait for it to ramp…
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Blog: Life Beyond WordPress to JAMStack
As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to get to a stable WordPress for a long time and maybe this time I’ll do it. JAMStack is creatingly better for vanity sites, but maybe this time for my blog as well. Well, just before the pandemic, I tried to get out of WordPress by going to a go-based…
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vid: Final Cut Pro Slideshow Tips: Portraits, Ken Burns, Panos, Transitions, Horizons, Zoom, HLG vs PQ
I have a huge number of things I’ve forgotten about Final Cut Pro, but in producing a nice slide show, here are the things I keep forgetting. By the way, I actually have a playlist for all these tricks for Podcasting, OBS, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro on YouTube which I use when I…
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pod: Rich and Steven talk AI as of end of August
There’s been a hiatus mainly because we’ve been shipping products, but more because I lost all my skills at making new videos. I was stuck for a long time on Drop Zones and doing a better intro and outro, but that’s a digression for Final Cut Pro nerds. In this episode, we cover the latest…
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vid: Final Cut Pro review, combine audio/video, make intros, drop zones
Man, this tool is just so complicated. I haven’t created an intro for six months and have completely forgotten all the things I’ve learned in: The latest tricks: Combining audio and video clips This is pretty unintuitive as well. Basically, if you say have a video effect and you want to marry it with say…
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dev: Move from poetry to uv
Thanks to Rakuto, I’ve made the switch from Poetry which was nice and worked well to uv which is from the folks at Astral, and even faster. The move to ruff and uv has been great although a bit of work. Here are some notes: Direnv virtual environments The trickiest part is that poetry and…
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Av: Final Audio Type E ear tips and Linsoul Tripowin Amber cables Rock!
Well I love my MOONDROP variations (Linsoul has them as does Amazon) but the stock ear tips let quite a bit of sound in and the stock cable is pretty stiff. On the internet I found great reviews for the final audio series E ($24 from Linsoul and Amazon) and the Spinfit CP155 (Large at…
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Dev: Vim magic substitutions, macros and yank buffers
I have been hacking away at Vim for a long time. There will be a long post on using Lazyvim for incredible power, but even the basic vim is crazy powerful. So as I’m writing lots of code right now Yank buffers I keep forgetting many of these commands, but if you want to to…
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home: the mysteries of alarm.com logins
Ok, I kind of wanted to just use Apple Home and Aqara for alarm systems but it turns out just to he too much maintenance and Apple home isn’t stable enough nor is there a way to be monitoring. It works decently well but the application is beyond confusing. There are some key concepts that…
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run: Salomon S/Lab Ultra 3, ADV Skin 12 and Speedcross 6
Well, thanks to Alex and Calvin, I’ve ended up getting back into running and it is nice to do the “grandpa shuffle” and be back into good cardio. They also showed me how great a hydration vest can be compared with a bladder. So overall, it’s time to upgrade gear to be on the road.…
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mac: Getting 4K HDR 60/120Hz 4:4:4 on LG B9 and Apple Silicon
Well, I’ve had lots of posts about this over the years and it is a confusing topic. But, basically here is what you need: Why go through this brain damage? Need for more ports It’s because I need more Thunderbolt 4 ports. CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 dock, I have attached it to a Razer Thunderbolt 4…
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dev: pipenv leftovers and neovim
OK, this is a strange one, I switch from using pipenv to asdf and poetry which is great for python and other virtual environments. Poetry and asdf are much faster and works per directory unlike condo, but one of the results is that neovim can get confused. Even though I never activate pipenv ever, with…