- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
Advanced vim hacking with neovim, coc, fzf and ripgrep
This product is so deep that I can’t even say how powerful it is. I’ve actually used the very first version of vi (pronounced “vee-eye”) when Bill Joy did the first cut, Wikipedia says it was in the very first BSD version, but that’s a longer story that doesn’t provide the whole story on how…
-
Upgrading your PC and display to a Home Theater
Well, computers and home theaters have really converged. Since the pandemic, I’ve been using a 55″ OLED television(thank you LG 55B9!) as a computer monitor. It’s awesome to have six (?!) windows open and to be able to write code in all of them. But what if in the evenings, you want to reuse this…
-
What to do when Verizon fails you? T-Mobile Cellular Router or Wifi Hotspot
Well, if you are unlucky to be stuck during this COVID-19 pandemic without wifi, life is going to be pretty hard. What happens if you are back to school and your cable appointment blown. The only real solution after you use your tethering data on your phone is to look for what is called a…
-
More linting is good
Well we’ve been using mypy and other python checking for a while, but just realized that there are ton more for just about any file type: Shellcheck. this is a a great utility that finds all kinds of errors. In my best written shell script, it identified two serious bugs I didn’t realize that I…
-
Snapplates for Tesla
Well, we kind of agree with Elon, the front of a Model 3 is too pretty to mar with a front license plate. Well, there are a couple of removable license plate vendors, but they require screwing something into the bottom of the fender which doesn’t sound super great. Well thanks to Ryan McCaffrey, he…
-
Various Vim and Bash tricks
OK, if you are doing some major hacking with vim as your toy IDE, here are some advanced things: Rewrapping text. There are a bunch of tricks here, the most important is to put in .vimrc the lines set tw=79 wm=2 which means wrap around line 79. If you need to rewrap then your friend…
-
Making your MacBook a home station
Well there a few steps in this long COVID-19 isolation to make your MacBook Air a nice workstation. This has gotten much easier with the advent of USB C and televisions that works monitors, but here are all the pieces that you need: I will put on tongfamily but does your computer have usb c.…
-
Ubiquiti Unifi Tuning Part Trois: AP Selection, Placement, Dream Machines et al
Well, we’ve always been a sort of half Synology and half Unifi house. That is we use Unifi APs and Synology does the data storage and video cameras. It’s sort of worked well with some notable failures: I bought a Cloud Key v1 to manage the Unifi APs, but this thing keeps rebooting itself over…
-
Blown Line Conditioner, Blown Pre-Amp RIP
Argh, this is definitely a first-world problem, but when you Audio Video Receiver breaks down and you are living in COVID-19 hibernation, it seems like a life crisis. We bought a nice set more than 10 years ago when Dolby 5.2 was super amazing as was HD at 1080p and the miracle of BluRay. Back…
-
T-Mobile CallerID plus Amex promotions and Credit Reports
Well as T-Mobile continues its merger with Sprint (sad that there is one less competitor, we need more for telecom :-), they are adding a few things: Scam Saver. You download this on your phone and it is supposed to block more scams we will see. Caller Id. This caused me to look at the…
-
Backup LG Magic Remote Compatibility
OK, this is a confusing topic, but if you have an LG television and lose it, you can’t actually turn the TV on. I know this because I spent 30 minutes looking for a remote that was under a chair. We wanted to figure out what backup remote to buy. This is a confusing topic…
-
Unifi Hacking Around V3
OK, so I’ve still been having problems with our Wifi. The big insight has been the turning on of Wifi AI and that at least our Windows machine can’t handle the so called DFS channels in 5GHz. The other thing is that I suspect there is a problem with longer range 5GHz where our Apple…
-
A Good Laptop is you don’t want to spend a fortune
Well the choices are a little complex right now. Having gone back to Windows 10, I can say that you will get a low cost option, but you will have problems. If you go with Apple it will be largely trouble free, but expensive. So what’s a person to do. Well assuming that you are…
-
Car washing and geek materials for windshields
I finally had a chance to wash our very dirty cars. Finally cleared up and to get the windshield washer fluid up to snuff. Here’s the quick (distracting from the COVID-19 epidemic list):OK, if you are going to get started, then if you love your car at all, getting a ceramic coating on top of…
-
Windows Networking Still so clunky, big disk problems with Windows Server and 5GHz WiFi DFS Problems
Man, I don’t use Windows too much any more, but somehow I would have thought that simple things like discovery in a home network would be fixed by now. With a Mac, it is trivial to discover a server with something claleedd Bonjour (or mDNS Responder) for power nerds. This basically has each peer in…
-
More Superhuman geek tricks
Ok they actually do answer you if you send mail to split inbox. Here is the trick: On their desktop applications, you create a “filter” first by doing a search with a / then you do a split inbox. So you can set this anyway you like with a huge number of different criteria including…
-
Quarantine Purchases of Random Stuff:
OK totally miscellaneous things that are breaking around the house: PanaMax Failure. Our PowerMax line conditioner failed and took down our AVR. So that’s super depressing. They apparently have a lifetime warranty and lifetime downstream warranty, so good luck, maybe if I call their 800 number they might actually fix it at 800.472.5555 so we…
-
Making email the proper center again
What a mess this quarantine lifestyle is. I have literally half a dozen channels I have to monitor from email to Slack to iMessage to Whatsapp to Signal to Teams. Then I have notifications from a host of products from Mac Calendar to Github to Trello. So one thing about this exploration of different mailers…
-
Superhuman, vi, slack and keyboard shortcuts rule
I haven’t done really heavy programming in a few years and in the last week I was reminded how important typing is even in the age of visual applications. It is just faster to get around and worth the effort if you are doing it all the time. So some quick tips: Divvy. Yes I…
-
Brother HL-L2380DW CUPS printer on Unifi Network to Apple and passing Bonjour
Ok some quick notes, if you have a Unifi network. If you have a network printer or an Apple TV, one big problem is that they have enabled an optimization called Multicast and Broadcast filtering’ which basically disables the ability for a wifi client to broadcast things like Bonjour or mDNS messages. You want to…
-
Mindless entertainment
If you need something to distract you and you want to see what Dave calls “clinically correct” gun-fu, then here four great choices; Old Guard. This just came out on Netflix. Charlize Theron is like the female John Wick and it’s nice she’s been practicing so much. And it looks like they are ready for…
-
Ugh WordPress database crashes
Ive been trying to be cheap with my DigitalOcean WordPress installation. I use a $5/month 1GB memory droplet which works pretty well. The problem is that if you run out of physical memory, then MySQL will crash and you get the dreaded, “No database connection message”. Here is what I’m doing about it:I created a…
-
The Saga of LG C6 and Unifi Continues
Well network stability remains. I think the fast roaming was the problem, but who knows. But the LG TV still can’t connect. Trying more Google fu, I found: I did get it to connect to 2.4GHz, but while it said it got an IP address and the DNS and I could it was connected, I…
-
Slack Hacking
Well, I use Slack a lot particularly for development projects. The integrations really make the difference. That said it is a super quirky application because it sprays settings across the mobile and web application. It’s confusing because they have two completely different technology sets (even in the 2020s!) so that (like Zoom), some settings are…
-
More on Unifi and that darn LG TV
Ugh, this is just a sea of settings, so it is hard to know what has been causing access losses, but something I did seems to have worked: The apple devices no longer get disconnect messages. I’m going to start turning things back on and see what is broken. But I turned basically all the…
-
Unifi Instability with Reconnects and Lost Passwords
This has been pretty strange and I’m pretty sure it has to do with the zillions of settings in the Unifi controller. I’ve been pretty aggressive about hitting every box for our home network, but here are some learnings from reading troubleshooting tips from Unifi: The symptoms: Devices will refuse to connect to our network…
-
(Solved) Kindle Won’t Turn On
Ok the main fix seems to be that and it worked for our paper white. There is not much you can do but charge it and hold the power button for 40 seconds. Our original kindle appears dead though 🙁 10 years old and it was still downloading. Pretty impressive but then charges but that’s…
-
Making Windows 10 with nVidia RTX 2080Ti work with an LG C9 UHD TV in HDR
This is actually way trickier than it looks because to take full advantage of 4K UHD HDR means you need to get the nVidia card means tweaking both in the graphics card and with the LG C9 television itself. If you are naive about this, you will find the TV keeps popping between HDR and…
-
Saving dollars with T-mobile
It’s amazing what they don’t tell you, but if you are a T-mobile customer some promotions that can save you money. The best way to do this is to periodically troll through the billing menus: Quibi is free for a year. You have to go to one line and it activates for all. And yes,…
-
Argh: iOS Mail chews up half you phone
Argh, this has really been a problem. I’ve constantly found that with a 64GB iPhone X, I’m running out of space all the time. I’ve kicked off a huge number of applications, but I’m constantly 99% full. In looking at Setttings > General > iPhone Storage, almost 40% of the system is taken up by…