Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Sam was asking.. so here they are. I used to use consumer reports for this but lately I’ve found Wirecutter is a pretty good review. The LL Bean is a good one.. After years of researching bedsheets—from cotton to flannel and everywhere in between—we’ve found the best sets no matter what your preference. — Read…

This sure isn’t easy, beside making sure that not every application snarfs your GPS what can you do. Well quite a bit actually, here are some recommendations: Be careful about the permissions and what applications you load. Lots of application will ask, “can I use your GPS even when I’m not running.” This is useful…

I’ve been using Oakley Evolutions for literally 20 years. Got them and they have lasted a long time, but the truth is they are a little small on the face and not photo sensitive, so they are either too light or too dark. The nosepiece also kept falling off, but they are great for acuity.…

Well still kind of a mess, but tongfamily.com now safely lives on a DigitalOcean droplet. It did crash once and I had to restart the Droplet, but hopefully that was because I’m munging on other things. If you have your own wordpress installation, here are recommendations: If you want simplicity, find a WordPress hoster that…

Two handy tools can help you determine if all those gushing reviews are the real deal. Try Fakespot and Reviewmeta — Read on www.cnet.com/how-to/spot-fake-reviews-amazon-best-buy-walmart/

If you are a nerd, and have range anxiety, how do you know how much charge you will really need. Here’s a way to figure it out Get a login to teslafi.com. It tracks your real world performance in minute detail. In particular it tracks the major variables like temperature and even wind. Get a…

I don’t know quite how or when I turned this on, but it turns out Bluehost has a very nice single configuration to sue Letsencrypt to get a free SSL certificate. But if you have their Sitelock tool on, then SSL doesn’t work and you can’t access it. I have to say their chat is…

I’ve been playing around with K8s and it is so attractive to just utter ​helm install stable/wordpress and get a running WordPress installation. But https://blog.ropnop.com/attacking-default-installs-of-helm-on-kubernetes/ warns us that you can get into real trouble here because tiller which is the server side piece of helm is unprotected, so any exploited pod can get access to the…

On to getting the right plugins so that it is easy to clone the environment. Some notes on keeping the minimal number of plugins and therefore surface area on attacks I’ve been using lots of different plugins, but the WordPress JetPack seems to keep growing and it is free, so some of the ones I…

OK this is confusing because 1Password’s scheme is pretty confusing 🙂 The short of it is that unlike Google or Facebook, there is not one URL to login. If you login to my.1password.com you are using your personal account. If you have a family or enterprise, then you need to login to a special URL that…

Well ok not exactly, but was fun to chat with Paul and pretend to be a radio star! And they have a nice embedding too!

They keep changing the way this works. But on a new machine or iPad, it is pretty likely that the authentication is going to be really frustrating. At least on my iPad and Mac, here are the symptoms: You connect to Starbucks Google as usual and then try browsing around and nothing happens. What is…

Wow this is really a black art to getting all this to work. There are some important things to understand if you have an Instapage site and are trying to get Facebook to work with and advertise it. TL;dr When you want to create a business on Facebook make sure: Never create an account that…

Here is where I am. A second level tech fixed WordPress. Said I had some bad ini Giles. I presume they mean php.ini. I suspect there were ones outside the main root directory. But it still doesn’t work correctly. Unfortunately she also changed the name of the blog and I moved domains so I have…

This was the first time that I had to take notes with this shiny new iPad Pro. I had thought the state of the art had moved farther along, but apparently there is no native handwriting recognition built into IOS. So you have to get something bundled with the application. The main thing is that…

We haven’t had time to put on our various accessories from the second round of purchases, but the bottom trunk organizer is just awesome and way better than just dumping everything down there. And I’ve got great hopes for the wheel cover protectors which look decently easy to install and those little pieces of rubber…

Well bike helmets haven’t changed much in years, but the latest improvement is in reducing rotation forces. The EPS foam in most helmets works fine for crushes, but most accidents cause your head to spin which ain’t so great for the Mark 1 Brain. The solution is a little piece of plastic that MIPS licenses…

This is an awesome tool that gives you more exact estimate of range that you need for trips. The main issue is that you do have to travel long enough to know how it works for your unique style. We use Stats on IOS and teslafi.com to predict how well we will do. When I’m…

OK now that I’m sort of digging out here are some notes about getting it all working on all of this stuff. There are a bunch of gotchas that are pretty hard to understand, but in short: Make sure you have ssh access into the actual Droplet. You get this by looking at the console…

Well it’s a long story but I’ve loved Bluehost for 15 years. And before that it was my buddy at another hosting company whose name I’ve actually forgotten. Imagine hosting? But last week things finally broke and I’m so mad at myself for not having a hot backup. It’s a strange subtle bug but basically…

Well different folks will have different opinions, but one issue with the Mac line has been a lack of power at the high end. The move to thinner and lighter has been great for laptops, but the high end really wants the power. The same with desktop systems where the older Mac Pro was beautiful…

Some good advice for new grad students and anyone who wants to read research papers. Some great advice on taking care of yourself and the Valley of Despair (which by the way is true for any job 🙂 The one I love the best is that others people success are not your failure, but man…

Well with tariffs coming, not a bad time to take a look and see what to get. Buying electronics for the next few years seems like a good idea 🙂 Here are some tips: When buying electronics, use the American Express Platinum if you have one. That’s because they will extend your warranty by two…

Wow, what a great resource, Andrew Ng’s CS229A is available for free on Coursera. It reminds me that to really learn something, you do have to code it and try it. The course is free and takes a nominal 12 weeks. They even supply TAs and folks to talk to. The only thing that is…

OK have had the camera for a bit now and of course various things have broken so some notes on accessories and other stuff that you will need: The screen is pretty vulnerable, I’m glad I had a screen protector on it. You probably want to order two. The Sony one is $28 for a…

If you are doing a podcast or a YouTube channel, you oftentimes want to take a short clip (which is a free use for editorial purposes), but what’s the easiest way to get a short clip. Here are some instructions 1. Do you have the movie already? If not, then you need to find a…

Well if you have a project, you are inevitably going to have some external software. Whereas most folks just say, copy in a file into your own project, this works and is easy, but it means that if there is an update you won’t get it. The other option is to have buckets of random…

Wow what a strange application SONY has written. I’m not sure why they did it this way but it is sure confusing. First of all setup is really confusing: You first download the Imaging Edge application from the AppStore You then must connect via WiFi. This requires you navigating to the Ctrl w/Smartphone entry. Going…

I had not realized it, but while pathogen is pretty awesome for managing bundles, it doesn’t have any update mechanism, so you have to recurl the ~/vim/autoload/plug.vim and also do a git pull for all your ~/vim/bundles which is kind of a pain. Maybe time to switch vim bundlers and folks like vim-plug and vundle particularly vim-plug. These…