Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK when you are traveling, you are going to hit a couple of strange situations. Here’s a tip list on what to do and to avoid when you are using an inflight, airport, hotel or public wifi spot. The net is that many of the security and convenience things you normally use will prevent you…

Well I need some more SD cards and I forgot them for this trip so what to get for a Sony A7R III. First thing is that they have two different readers. The slot 1 is a UHS-II with up to 300MBps write speed while slot 2 is slower. So use slot 1 for videos…

OK, in the continuing mission to archive all that is interesting. This comes from ancient history, but I remember reading this memo to this day. John Walker was the founder of Autodesk and he was really worried about what was going to happen as mass market beat high profit small markets. His note call information…

The new droplet on Digital Ocean has been working really well. Much faster than bluehost, but I am getting an outage about once every two weeks. The droplet seems to hang with a “no database connection” message. I normally just restart the droplet, but it is not good. The bluehost site would stay up for…

Well there are many new things in IOS 13, but one of the nice things is the markup tools. Now when you take a screenshot on your ipad, by pressing (hat tip to TapSmart) the power and the volume up buttons, you can add markup to it and then hit send. When you combine this…

Hat tip to Apple News (apple.news/Adc-k1z4WPyGVGEjkLFK-rg) and to Fossbytes (https://fossbytes.com/4-new-electric-cars-make-millions-evs-audi/) for explaining the various platforms that VW is going to use over the next few years. To review Tesla platforms To review, car manufacturers often use the same guts underneath and put different stuff on top as an example, here is how Tesla works. A…

lifehacker.com/zip-together-two-freezer-bags-to-make-one-large-one-1839012018 explains that you can make a double sized ziplock really easily, just turn one inside out and you can put a double length thing inside. Really smart.

Wow such a small change, such a big nightmare. The Unifi Controller is dependent on the right Java runtime. Oracle has been constantly tightening their licensing, making it harder and harder to just run Java. So in the last few years, Apple stopped shipping the JRE. So Ubiquiti took up the slack and included the…

Wow, well as usual, Apple announced their latest iPhone and their focus on the camera and battery life are pretty incredible. The new iPhone Pro supports simultaneous video recording with a feature called Multicam. In fact with the Pro, it can record four video stream simultaneously. This is super cool for being able to seamlessly…

Many of these providers now have a regular security update and I just got one from Github. So if you use it and have sensitive code up there, here are the things to do by browsing to the Github security page. https://github.com/settings/security Authentication recovery. They have a new place where you can connect your Facebook…

You have to still use USB and iTunes to do this or pretend your book is music. Apparently, if you have a set of MP3s that are book from outside of Apple, then here are your choices if you don’t want to have this problem: Remark the type from Audiobook to Music which messes up…

Now that everyone has an iPhone. I’ll cover dealing with Android next Take Photos Live and Airplane Mode OFF The most confusing thing is the number of different ways to share things. But assuming that you have IOS 13 on your iPad here’s what to do. This assumes that you are remote and there is…

apps.apple.com/us/app/exif-metadata/id1455197364 Well amazing, it seems like it is impossible to actually look at the EXIF or meta data in the JPEGs and photos that you have. That makes it hard to really detailed editing and to see the resolution of photos. Instead, you have to use a third party application to do this. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metapho/id914457352 is…

Well this is always a little complicated, but some notes on doing this: If you are non-profit, Github actually provides you with a free organizational membership. You just send them an email and then a copy of your IRS tax status and you get upgraded. When you create your first repos, you will find that…

Talk about strange interaction. We have a bunch of IP cameras (Ok, we have two, but one is completely dead, not sure why). And I tried to access it from the Synology NAS. First of all, make sure you are using Chrome, it doesn’t seem to work with Safari, but also this time I ran…

If you are a WordPress user and want to use Facebook Pages for your business or non-profit, you are in for a bit of a learning curve. There are quite a few things different about it that really threw me off, heres a quick list: User models: Personal vs Business Most of this is not…

Well the future is coming. These are very different technologies. Instead of backlights and dimming, these TVs use individual LEDs in an array. So super expensive today but it means that they can scale to literally any size. See www.anandtech.com/show/13850/samsung-at-ces-2019-219inch-and-75inch-micro-led-ultrahd-tvs-demonstrated

Wow thanks to Dr Smith for a great recommendation. If you are getting genetics the usual way. You do a copay if usually $15 and get your stuff. Well there’s a better way. For instance, if you need predinisone for something, the copay is $15 but with GoodRX it is just $6? GoodRX is a…

If this is true it is an incredible achievement. This is with a future power train with three motors to ship next year called Plaid. I want one now 🙂 And there is some speculation that the actually timed lap will be faster. That’s because this time was done with other cars on the road,…

Well it seems like everyone is doing it so I thought I would start too. It won’t be complicated to do a weekly show. I figure I’ll just put into audio whatever I’m posting on, so it will be geek tips and tricks and whatever people ask me about. But before you do, there are…

Well with the new iPhone 11 coming out, it’s time once again to talk about cases and things. I don’t know if we will get them (as we love our iPhone X’s quite a bit), but one thing to think about is getting protection for these lovely $1K marvels. Here is what has stood the…

First of all as a free credit card, if you can control your spending then it makes sense to get the free ones. It increases your credit longevity in the long run and it will lower your credit utilization. The card is easy to get. Just apply in the Apple Wallet application. If you get…

OK, Catherine guilted us into it. Rather than buying bottled soda water or anything like that, why not just use a Sodastream and fire it up. We had already switched from bottled still water to using a filter (not really needed where we live, the water is just so good), but she was right about…

Yes just need to redo. Short story is the lg OLED are the highest quality with amazing color contrast. First is 8k As with 4K, content lags and u need hdmi 2.1 to see anything from a PC. So good to wait. 8K Really going to be great for “flush” displays that are super close.…

Holy crap. In the time it took me to get ready to put 10TB drives into our NAS array, the industry is moving to 18TB. They will be expensive but geez they even say that 40TB is on the way. They use microwaves to cook up platter and get more density. For us home users…

This is supposed to one of the best if not the best hike in all the Canadian Rockies. Inafarawayland.com said it was number 2 and AllTrails folks think it might be the very best with 34 five star reviews. It’s a tough hike. From the Lake O’Hara lodge, you start around the lake then immediately…

Well first of all, any bike helmet is better than nothing. I don’t want to admit the number of times I get on a Lime or Jump bicycle without a helmet. I really need to carry on with me. And I do admit, I try to limit a ride like that to less than a…