Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well the smartest person I know (ok I’m biased one of the three smartest people amongst the Alex, Calvin and Grace crowd). But Calvin did a great job summarizing on his new blog (he’s imprisoned in his own self-quarantine). But he has some great summaries of how to be really productive and the comments are…

I haven’t used Windows much these last few years. Most development has been on the Mac and Linux. But getting back to it because of gaming and I had completely forgotten how delicate Windows can be. We have a Dell Alienware Aurora R8 computer and it tries to work like a sealed box. I got…

Well in the old days, there was a thing called SLI which basically had two video cards and they each took a line of a display, so you could get them to really cooperate. Today, nVidia has taken the idea farther and generalized it. Now they have something called NVLink which looks like a really…

Auto blog has good advice. We had never leased before and were completely noobs. Lessons are The lease Company has a contractor who inspects your car. Meet them in person preferably at home. So u can see the report. If u have damage it can costs thousands. Yes the tires can’t be bald, the windows…

It’s a little confusing, but Amazon has no less than three different places to buy things. From someone who used to work there, here’s how you should think about where to go. But in life where there is a huge delivery shortage. Make sure that you just have them drop it off at your door.…

Kodi (formerly XBMC, formerly Xbox Media Connect) has been an awesome tool for us to have a nice front end so that handles all the DVDs and other things we have digitally in the house. Since nVidia Shield is really an Android device, this is really an Android application. It basically indexes a network server…

ARgh, yet another fall out of the Corona Virus that they don’t talk about much, but if you are buying from Amazon, getting things from China doesn’t seem to be a problem. But that’s not true for all shippers. I ordered something directly from corsair.com and this came directly from China. It is now on…

OK, when you have terabytes of data at home, you definitely will. have losses. I’ve had a bad RAID array that corrupted a bunch of JPEGs and it is super sad. So what’s the solution to this: If you are using BTRFS, then you can turn on bit scrubbing. This basically in the background ensures…

OK, lots of opinions will vary about the ultimate effects and so forth, but here’s a collection of various people’s opinions about the extent of it. Some are pretty technical, but for a nerd like me understand the mathematics of epidemiology is pretty interesting, so without comment. These are not scientific papers, but analysis of…

I never really understood where iMovie Theater was coming from. Once you make an iMovie, then it went into a separate video sharing system called Theater. Well, that has all gone away now and you are now supposed to put the movies into iCloud Photos. And yes, I know that is not entirely logical to…

OK, now that I’m all btrfs on this Synology, there are ton of implications. The big one is that this is a Copy-on-write file system. That means, that, normally when you do something like a massive 1TB file with other files systems like ext4 You are actually literally copying. So it will take a long…

OK, I finally got a message I’ve been avoiding for two years. One of my disk arrays is finally at capacity. So time now in 2020 to think about what to do about home storage. Alot has changed in the last two years most notably: Disk sizes have grown incredibly. Two years ago, 10TB was…

SVB is one of the top bankers for high tech companies. They have a nice program for startups to get access and be part of the community. At the same time, the interface has some tricky parts so here are some tips: SVB does have some nice discount codes for services like Docusign that you…

Wow a cool side effect of the switch to btrfs for Synology is that backups have now become easy. With b-tree file systems, doing a backup is as simple as doing a snapshot. When ever there is a change, it will just remember what has changed. Another advantage is that you can clone over the…

Well two friends have been asking me about buying laptops and general advice. Here are some things to know: Laptop longevity. No one really talks about this, but if you buy a $700 laptop and it lasts three years before it falls apart, it’s not necessarily cheaper than a $1,500 laptop that lasts 10 years.…

Just did this transition and there are some things that are a little tricky, here’s a list: There isn’t an easy way to migrate mail. Assuming you aren’t a big company, the easiest way is to just have individual people open up mail in their Outlook or Mac Mail clients and copy the mail back…

Ok, you have a placeholder name for your startup, but then a brilliant flash and suddenly placeholder.com becomes cool.com so how do you make the switch. Well, there are two places where this needs to happen. First is with Gsuite so that your email comes from the right place which is technically called, changing your…

Ok the third major episode. Really a test. A quick 12-minute review of how to get your companies online https://anchor.fm/richt/episodes It’s also on Spotify check us out https://open.spotify.com/show/ And then Google as well. https://www.google.com/podcasts

It’s been a while, but reading from last week, the main focus has been getting a website up and running. From finding a new name on Namecheap to connecting it to Digital Ocean or AWS Route 53 and then GSuite. See https://richtong.org for the text posts. For the Amazon book list Send in a voice…

I’ve been slowly moving my organizational stuff to either AWS or Digital Ocean and just had a strange thing. Normally it’s pretty simple. If you have Namecheap, you just to to Route53 on AWS, choose create Hosted Zones. This is their name for a Domain Name. You will get some NS records which are four…

I hit this bug at just the wrong time. But with two factor authentication turned on (and you really want 2FA for something like 1Password), I was getting a strange hang. Fortunately, their message board is awesome and you just need to upgrade to the latest Mac App Store version 7.4.3.

If you have a small startup or a family, 1Password is an awesome tool. For $5/month, you get a very secure zero-knowledge system for storing passwords. The main issue is that it is pretty complicated to figure out how to use it properly. So here are some tips: You are allowed five user accounts with…

Well if you are on a desert island or recovering from a surgery, what a great time to catch up on reading (or if you are like me, listening to a book tape while driving). Here are some great sources: Readings on philosophy. Hat tip to Keith for this one, but from Massimo Pigluicci Rich’s…

Ok I’ve been buying a bunch of domain names for folks. Namecheap makes it makes it super easy to buy new domains and there are so many new top level domains that it’s never been easier to find a good one. So how do you transfer a domain well there are the easy steps First…

Ok something changed with iOS and MacOS so now with Bluehost mail we are getting all these SSL errors. See https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/email_manager/config for your personal configuration. In looking at the instructions, it looks like with non-SSL. Which you never want to use, you use `mail.domain.com` for your domain, this then maps to your actually shared host…

Argh, this is so frustrating. I had an unusual two hours between meetings today and it didn’t make sense to go home. So I thought I would try the T-Personal Hotspot that is on both my phone and my iPad. While I absolutely love the iPad with the cellular. Yes, it costs $20/month, but the…

Well, while I’ve been following Tesla very closely, I’ve only been peripherally aware of what is going on with SpaceX. Obviously, they are really shaking up the launch business and someday we will go to Mars because of them, but more practically, what they are doing with Starlink promises to have a much more immediate…

Well the build of a monster machine is always interesting and being at the bleeding edge is a sheer joy (agony!). So if you are crazy enough to want to build a 32-core, 256-GB memory with 2TB SSD and 16TB hard disk (https://pcpartpicker.com/user/richtong/saved/#view=gH4K4D) As always you can either work for a gigantic company where they…