Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

One of the problems with the really nice Sony RX100 series of cameras is that they don’t come with a cold shoe at the top anymore. That means you can’t mount a video light if you are shooting in low light and you can’t mount a high performance microphone if you are vlogging. The solution…

Man, Comcast. What a racket. You pretty much need to every year, figure out what the best plan is. I would actually put it into your calendar for a yearly check. So here is what I’ve found for 2020: They have a new charge system where they have “unbundled” the licensing fee. So if they…

OK word to the wise. This is actually a really hard thing to debug. But today when we got home, the Internet connection was completely dead. It is so hard to know what happens, then, but the debugging steps are: Find a computer and see if you can get a WiFi connection. If not, then…

OK, some really strange things trying to get a public repo working. Many times when you are trying to recreate a machine learning work is that you need to have the data along with the actual code. It’s unfortunately completely non-standard how this is handled. I had thought that I could just turn Git LFS…

Ok so what if you want the ultimate machine. To our things into perspective. When the IBM PC first launched, the hot rod computer was the IBM PC XT. It had a 5MB hard disk. The first of its kind. And it cost $5-6K if you can believe that. And that was in 1985 or…

OK, so the first season was one episode of five minutes, that still counts! Seriously, starting the podcast series up. Getting to know the equipment. Using Anchor.fm to publish which is pretty cool. I don’t have an Apple podcast listing yet, but it is on Spotify and Google Podcast. Here are the links to the…

I normally have a terrible time using the rewards programs on various merchant sites. It’s not easy, you get the rewards later and they quickly expire (which is obviously the point). A buddy got $60 of Dell Rewards that expire in March 2020, so what’s a decent deal, well, it’s pretty hard to find, but…

Well just had a friend do this. You do need to be careful. So here’s the scoop. Don’t force the nozzle in. They are designed to be incompatible. Also diesel is black and car is clear so be aware. Finally what happens. Well if you put diesel into a gas car. It gums up the…

Man, this has gotten to be nearly impossible. Here are the issues. If you use your personal id for a developers account, you can only have one corporate account per. My personal Apple Id is locked to an old company and I’m not sure how to get rid of it. The longer-term solution is to…

I’m learning how to write Dart using Flutter and that’s a whole new tool set of me. It works like React but is much better with nicer debugging tools and way nicer than trying to figure out what Webpack did wrong. The tutorial at Udacity is semi-decent and free. The main issue is that they…

I do have to keep some files in sync. The biggest problems are my personal photos. I do keep a copy in iCloud Photos, which remarkably is dealing with 54K photos and 2K videos decently well (except for Mac Photos which seems to hang alot and not sync, but that’s another post). But for backups,…

Wow, availability on these chips is pretty horrible. They are just up on preorder at B&H or Newegg but not on Amazon yet. Folks are getting them in dribs and drabs, so have to be patient. PC Part Picker is a great resource to keep track of availability. Why is all this happening, well the…

Well I had an update this fall and got some incredible Julbo Aero Zebra Light sunglasses. Decoding all of that, this means a sun glass that goes from light tint to pretty dark automatically. It uses a chemical that is light sensitive. Those were $105 on close out so pretty hard to beat, so here…

Well until now, getting a good winter tire for the Model 3 Performance was complicated and you had to go third party. It is out of stock now, but the new Model 3 19” Gemini Wheel is the factory answer. These are what are used in China for Model 3 and they pack 19” snow…

Argh I love the thing but today it failed. Note to everyone. The tip can come loose an it won’t work. So make sure the nib at the bottom is tight.

OK, Apple has finally tightened up the requirements for running executables and Applications on the Mac. You now need every application to be signed and the components too. This has gotten complicated and you will get messages like this. The solution is pretty unintuitive. When you get the dialog, it actually asks you to throw…

When you get to a certain age, you remember moments and then realize that you never got a chance to say thank you for the great things that happened. We were having a great dinner today and were talking about typography and how amazing it is. All that led to a great discussion about: Paula…

Well this site started in 1996 and it was pretty new then, but everyone seems to be doing a podcast and it has sure gotten easier. Just go buy some equipment. More on that soon, then crank up GarageBand, signup for an Anchor account and suddenly you have https://anchor.fm/richt as our very first podcast. Every…

Well, what if you want to build the ultimate do-it-yourself machine. In the business, there is the desktop and then HEDT (High-end desktop). I’ve built a few and they are all about the pride of building. With today’s cloud and server farms, a lot of that power shouldn’t be on the desktop, but is sure…

If you have a pilot friend then during xmas Xmas, then folks at The Point Guy so if you want to get them something amazing. The two coolest things are a desk made out of a wing if you happen to have a cool $2.5k handy. Or wander over to Etsy and find a restore…

Most of our family uses iPhones, so photo sharing is much easier with the iCloud Photo Sharing feature, there are just a couple of gotchas you need to know about: The actual photos in sharing are limited to 4MP resolution. That’s a bummer and it means that you should only use this for people who…

Someone brought this up and it got me curious, with these passive entry systems, it is super convenient to walk up to a Tesla with your phone in your pocket and just have the doors open. Or if you have a luxury car like a BMW to be able to walk up and have the…

Ok if you are unlucky like me and your monster PC of the last six years literally blew up (ok the actual fish tank it was in cracked but that another post 🙂 So what if you want a great PC and want it for the holidays. What should you get? First of all, why…

Well, this is a bit of a pain because the Model 3 Performance has really big brake calipers so that you can’t fit the aero wheel 18″ that comes with the normal Model 3. That’s a bummer because the wheel covers give you almost 5% more range (and every little bit counts with a car…

What font did Tesla use yesterday? Think what you like about the event, I thought the font is just cool. It costs something but really cool It’s called BB Strata Pro https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/boldstudio/bb-strata-pro/text-medium/ Using whatfontis.com for those you on a budget, College Sans is pretty close. — Read on www.reddit.com/r/identifythisfont/comments/dzz7ii/what_font_did_tesla_use_yesterday/

Well the title for the best free anti-virus seems to shift between Avast and Sophos, depending on the day. But for me, having Avast available via Homebrew tips the scale so that makes it easy to maintain with brew cask install avast-security

OK, I seem to update this everytime I use the camera, but this should also apply to the A7R IV, although I don’t quite have one. Here are the recommendations based on the three different types of photos you can take Use RAW on a Mac or PC for regular photos Although the JPEG processing…