Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

If you try to figure out how much Disk space you have with a tool Space Gremlin, you could be in for a big surprise because the disk layout has changed. If you have say a 1TB Mac disk, it will show that you have 2TB and there is a new volume called “Macintosh HD…

I just wrote about how you use the custom fonts on your iPhone or iPad, but for the Mac, things are a little simpler: First figure out what font you want with What Font Is? or similar utility. Then see if that font is available in Homebrew Fonts because that makes it much easier to…

OK this is a bit mysterious, but if you have some standard templates that you like to use, then Google has two completely different ways of doing this: If you have a personal account, then you create a dummy document with your styles and layouts loaded into it. Then when when you create a document,…

Well, this is pretty confusing mainly because the Chrome developer tools keep changing, but for November 2019, here is how to do it: Download Chrome Enable Developer tools Start them with View/Developer/Developer Tools Now a window opens on the left, you want to click on the upper left icon there called Select Item to Inspect…

Well, it is good to push products and one area that I’ve been confused about is what are the limitations for Google Slides for the iPhone and on the Web. It is remarkably good at collaboration and “good enough” layout, but if you want to really get work done on an iPad only can you?…

Well, Mark (and everyone else who is going to get a Mac Pro, or an AMD Ryzen Threadripper) needs to get a great monitor to go with it, so what to get if you want the actual best display. First of all there are threee big uses for this kind of monster computer: General computer…

Normally I use Google Slides for most presentations. You can add any Google Font to it with more fonts. And if there are fonts which are not there then you can use the Extensis add-on for other fonts. I also recently got a Keynote presentation. This is a downloadable thing. But when you load it,…

Well about to experiment with using Ghost as a blogging platform so it’s a good time to do some basics with tongfamily.com: Installing Disqus. After you create a login on Disqus, look at the at the tutorial, but basically you install the Disqus Plugin. I actually used a third party tool called Disqus Lazy Load.…