Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

We went with Kim and Tom for a nice hike and I was reminded that when getting introduced to hiking there are so many toys and tricks that make it easier to live the sport. 1. Make sure you have all fitting shoes. You ones that are light that Huber you the support that you…

French press is one of the easiest, least expensive ways to make great coffee. Learn the essentials: here’s how to make a pot of great French press coffee. — Read on www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-perfectly-robust-french-press-coffee-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-113601 The short story is Get decent beans Get a decent 32 ounce French press and get a burr grinder for $28. For power…

Well getting better at least for me means three things 00. Stay safe It’s an awesome sport but it’s on the road so be careful. Get a helmet of course. But also have a helmet mounted light even during the day time. Try to use trails particularly at first. Assume that no one sees you.…

I can’t quite believe I lived without a 12″ iPad for so long. Finally got one after they put faceid into it. They are about to update it again with a third camera, so it is best to hold off, but when they do announce it here are the things that you should get for…

Ugh, this is one of the nightmares of having lots of frequent flyer and hotel programs. This is the untold story of my life. I don’t know how many zillions of points and miles I’ve lost by not paying attention. Here are the tricks: Sign up for AwardWallet. They often have sales, but for about…

In 2017, we got a bed online via Amazon. It turned out to be a great purchase with great satisfaction. So now it’s time to refresh the analysis and see what has changed. Using both Amazon reviews filtered by Fakespot.com we see: Nod for Needle & Tufts Full Sized. They were one of the pioneers…

Mark just asked about VPNs and here’s the quick scoop. First is that the main reason to get a VPN is for privacy reasons. There are really two choices. If you want your own personal VPN server, I’m not sure $20/month is the cheapest but some folks are offering preconfigured personal servers. The advantage is…

OK here is a strange one. On one of my MacBooks, suddenly neither Authy nor 1Password One Time Passwords were working. They would be completely different from my other devices. After spending time with Authy support and not being able to find anything, I saw one strange thing. The clock on my MacBook was off…

Why does every device have their own idiosyncrasies on this? Ok, here are the instructions for a Sony WH-1000MX. Turn the thing off with the power button Press and hold the button for seven seconds Look for the blue LED to blink rapid twice, then wait, then twice again. If the headphone is just one…

Ok this is confusing, in the old days a PAR30 meant and halogen light that was 30 1/8″ of an inch (that is 30 * 0.125″ = 3.75″ wide). And they use the medium sized socket called the E26 base you see in a regular light bulb (technically that is called an A shape with…

Well the Bluehost site was a pain, but didn’t have this kind of instability. So now trying to figure out what is wrong. This took a long while, but tl;dr, look at your DNS configuration sometime. But here is the debugging and the main notes are to use curl -v extensively to look at Apache2 rewrite,…

Well it’s complicated to explain what to think about when buying a car. First of all it’s the second largest investment that anyone is going to make and it is not like a phone. It is an asset that will last years. But, advice has never been more important because so many things are changing…

Well, that was easy. If you get an invite at https://www.apple.com/apple-card/ then you pretty quickly get an email allowing you to enter. It is really just a few clicks on your phone. You get it by hitting + in your Apple Wallet. It gives you 3% back on Apple purchases and 2% back on Apple Pay purchases.…

This has got to be the most undiscoverable feature with the iPad. You can create a split screen by just dragging a tab to the right side and you get the split screen. But how do you turn it off. It turns out that the trick is long press on the tab button and you…

We keep getting asked, what are the good Chinese restaurants. Well YMMV, but here’s our current list of spots that we love: Dough Zone. They actually have five very different locations in the area. The International District one is super convenient for Mariners games and so forth, but they have a long wait list. The…

Brian reminded me that it is time for the annual update on how to manage GitHub repositories and your open-source connection. It turns out there are only a few paths that don’t lead you to a dead end. After four years of using it, here’s a quick set of tips, tricks, and traps: Identities Have…

It used to be that WordPress had a separate build for multiple sites called WordPress Multiuser (WPMU0 That is being to handle multiple websites in a single WordPress installation. That’s why most of my personal sites are just separate WordPress installations. However way back in V3, they got rid of that and now every WordPress…

This is one of the most confusing things about hosting a website, you basically have three distinct choices to make when you start a site, you can use the same for all three pieces or you can mix and match Registrar. This where you buy your domain. Shop around, but I find Namecheap to be…

My buddy Mark asked me the what antivirus I’m using and that reminded me I haven’t posted on this topic for a while. I’ve used a variety of these schemes. There was a day when Mac’s didn’t need antivirus, but that has long gone. There’s a huge variety of anti-virus packages and PC Magazine did…

Well this is a little silly Google Docs does not allows an image to be in the background, you can have it inline or it can break text, but not in the background. The hacky solution is to create a drawing and this does support layers. Doesn’t work for multipage, but not bad for titles…

Ok, here’s the issue, it would be awesomely nice to have tongfamily.com point to www.tongfamily.com but AWS Route53 does not allow this, you have to have a hard address A record for this. Bluehost and Digital Ocean handle this magic, but not Amazon. So what’s the work around? If you just use a CNAME alias, you can…

Wow this is a pretty complicated topic. It seems like every organization has a different view of how the world works. Sometimes, on GitHub for instance, it is all tied to email names, you create an organization as a separate thing and then just have a list of emails names that are that organization. In…

OK, I do it all the time, but just to review some of the key rules for hiking (Courtesy of allcampgrounds.com. Most folks feel like there is a trade off between safety and enjoying the woods. The truth is that you can be safe and you will still feel untethered from modern society. It is…

Don’t be as dumb as me. Do not ever update your Shimano Di2 from a phone that is low power mode. If you do and the lock screen comes on, then the Bluetooth LE connection gets interrupted and the Shimano Di2 shifting system hangs. It won’t even shift or respond. This is a super common…

Well electrification is happening to bikes and that’s a good thing. It’s going to solve two big problems: 1. Riding with a group. Riding is fun but if you fall off the back or on a hill, it’s joy great. An ebike let’s you keep up by shaving the soul sucking peak wattage. Most of…

m.youtube.com/watch We got this Modesta ceramic coating and it is like your car is waxed all the time. It really look amazing but to maintain it, is a bit complicated. But fun to know. Here are some tips: Do this when cool and not in the sun. You don’t the car drying in the heat!…

Ok nerdy topic, but we’ve been gradually going to a Tri-mode system where I use Bluehost for casual stuff, DigitalOcean for stuff I care about like tongfamily.com and AWS for the big boy pants work. Part of that transition is moving from Bluehost DNS services to AWS services. This is called Route53 and is quite…

Well, it’s been 18 months into an experiment, reigniting old friendships and getting in touch with colleagues, some from 20 years ago!). One of the great outputs has been learning so much about so many things. And Bill wondered if there was a way to share it. Right now I have a book queue of…

I wrote a post nearly eight years ago on how to use Vuescan with a Minolta Dimage 5400 to get amazingly good scans of old images, but this doesn’t quite work for Black and White mainly because the Filter Infrared is off for Black and White scanning. So if your images are pretty clean then…