Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Looking to book an award flight on a Star Alliance carrier? These are the best websites to use to find availability. The short answer is that ANA is the most accurate for figuring out availability if a little hard to read. Then comes Air Canada. The United site unfortunately often shows phantom awards that don’t…

OK I get this about three weeks or so on our new DigitalOcean Droplet running WordPress. The good news is the JetPack does inform you when it dies. TL;dr If you have your WordPress created with the one-click Droplet under DigitalOcean it works great except that there is no swapfile, so with a 1GB RAM…

Mark sent me a note from some random person about how MacBook Pro’s are the stepchildren of the Apple world. The complaints which I’ve heard quite a bit come down to: The keyboard isn’t great. The updates have been slow. It doesn’t have enough ports with only USB C. I’ll be a little contrarian about…

Well, I’ve really loved the Julbo Aero Pro with photochromic lenses. I got them for $105 on Amazon which I now realize was an incredible deal from Backcountry as a closeout. Sad to say. But the aero pro with zebra light is really good. I got the ones which were Zebra Light lenses category 1-3…

OK after a whole summer of hiking, this is a good time to pick up all those vital things that you can forget about. Here’s a reminder of real necessities when hiking: Trekking Poles. Yes, they really do help the knees Microspikes. You don’t need them until you need them, but they are really great…

link.medium.com/9jatcGRSYZ shows some incredible new results. It is only with mice, but some research shows that the right light and sound flashing at 40 hertz can reduce Alzheimers how is that possible???

Pradeep asked me other day what bike to get for someone who is fit and where you want them to love biking. Well there are many choices here but if you are fit and maybe someday want to do the Seattle to Portland or you are generous enough to want to get someone into touring…

OK, we’ve had this domain sort of working for the last month and here are some tips and tricks for doing this Multisite Fixing Security: SSH Keys Using your own SSH keys. Lightsail is really convenient. By default it creates an SSH key pair for every region that you have. This means that you don’t…

Wow WordPress is so complicated, there are a zillion different ways to change the maximum image upload size. With WordPress 5.x single site, while you can edit the maximum file size in wp-config.php, the easier way is to use a plugin that sets it called brilliantly, upload-max-file-size With Multisite WordPress 5.x, this again moved, but…

Multisite WordPress is a little strange on registrations of users for commenting. Basically, the default is that you register only at the top level. That is there is a user that works across the entire network. You enable this in the Network Admin/Settings/Network Settings/Registration Settings. But then you need to add a plugin that let’s…

OK I keep forgetting all these tricks, but make sure to turn autoindent on and then you get nice indenting. So with the > and < to indent forward, there is CTRL-T to indent and CTRL-D to outdent. Then you get these tricks. Where you combine those operators with % which says go to the…

Suppose you want to move from a site.com to a new site.com on another hoster. Here are the steps: First if you use WordPress Export/Import, the one quirk is that the export does not include the actual Media Library, instead, it includes URL links. That means that to do a swap, you need to leave…

Well for sure I’ve been having incredible problems with redirect loops. The symptom is the site just keeps looping with problems. This first started with iThemes Security where I had: The subsites kept redirecting back to the main site with the message that user creation was not available. They had really strange referrer URLs. Then…

OK I had a chance to redo a droplet installation and I’m trying to make this the minimum path. There are so many different pieces that you need to know, so here is a guide that should help: First of all you need to buy a domain name. I use namecheap.com for this. With some…

Argh, Sony is such a strange company sometimes. But, with the update to MacOS Cataline (10.15), all their utilities break. The most important of which is firmware updates for the Sony A7R Mark III. The version 3.0 added human eye AF and animal eye AF and this won’t download properly with Catalina. YOu just have…

I got bored of video games about five years ago. They just all seemed the same. I used to love the realistic simulations of things. The original F-15 Strike Eagle (designed by Sid Meier and shipped by Microprose) was amazing. In fact, you can still run this game as F-15 Strike Eagle III on Windows…

No I don’t mean the submarines, I mean putting electric power into a boat. This has been a difficult challenge because of the power that it takes when you get close to planing. Boats draw very little power when they are at hull speed. For example, the Silent Yachts 55 (55 foot long boat), draws…

TSLA earnings call for the period ending September 30, 2019. — Read on www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2019/10/24/tesla-inc-tsla-q3-2019-earnings-call-transcript.aspx Wow Tesla just killed it this quarter incredible decreases in cost of goods bodes very well. Also very positive on shanghai gigafactory. They say it is 40% less capex and built in less than a year. Finally model Y moves up…

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…