Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well there are bunch of different choices with watches now. Overall, there are a few choices, but increasingly they are moving to opposite ends of the spectrum, so some recommendations: Apple Watch Well, I wouldn’t actually buy a Series 4 right now, it has the ECG thingy, but the upcoming watch is rumored to have…

OK, I have a Mac with a relatively small 256GB drive and right now 82GB are taken up by two caches in the system: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.iLife-Slideshow-Extension/Data/Library/Caches. Stackoverflow shows that this is really a cache of JPEG files that are converted from all your HEIC files. It let’s normal application run Insert Photo without having to know…

Nice quotes on using telemedicine to diagnose strokes in remote locations. Good job Dave! www.vidyo.com/wp-content/uploads/Case-Studies/vidyo_case_study_SUTTER.pdf And watch him on TV: youtu.be/Yp6AaPtzdT8

I can’t quite believe how much pricing for UHD televisions have fallen. Now you can get a 43″ UHD TV that is a terrific monitor for you home computer for just $249. 4k.com has a great list of smaller monitors. I What you need to make it work? Divvy I’ve used both 40″ and 43″…

Wow that’s pretty incredible. Super high price but now disc brake bikes are lighter than rim brakes. Had to happen. And this one is under the UCI weight limit. Pretty cool. bikerumor.com/2019/07/11/canyon-ultimate-cf-evo-disc-carbon-road-bike-goes-ultralight-under-6kg-complete/

If you are starting a company, it’s easy to get lost in a blizzard of paper and email attachments. Resist the temptation not to worry too much about it, because this is one case where a few simple procedures will make life way, way, way easier later. Everyone is going to forget things and here’s…

Wow it would be ugly but adding 860W from an on car solar array would be pretty awesome. It won’t get you far but 860W x 8 hours is 6.4kWh or about 8% of a Model 3 AWD. And 8% is 24 miles so not nothing. Hat tip to hackaday.com/2019/07/10/using-super-efficient-solar-cells-to-keep-your-electric-cars-battery-topped-up/

bikerumor.com/2019/07/09/defeet-evo-disruptor-wind-tunnel-tested-most-aero-cycling-sock-ever/ Now I’ve heard everything. Saving 8 watts by wearing special stippled socks. Way easier than getting 5% fitter 🙂

Well, most of the time range in a EV doesn’t matter, but if you are planning a road trip where chargers are scare or where you are being aggressive. Or you are just a plain nerd, here’s a way to ping pong between Teslafi.com and Abetterrouteplanner.com to figure out what your actually consumption is. If…

Here’s some retro advice that Mark reminded me about. It’s been tempting to get a cheap inkjet like the OfficeJet from Costco. But most of the time it doesn’t make sense. First the cost of consumables is outrageous. It’s a razor blade business. You can try to use off brand or refilled ink cartridges but…

If you are a most cyclists, I’d really suggest sticking with Wahoo bike computers. Garmin are nice hardware but just too complicated to have it pair it. The biggest reason still to get one is because their Radar is just really cool and important if there is lots of traffic. That being said if you…

Well it’s gotten way more complicated, but here’s the 2019 update on what to do. Now this won’t for everything and it will break some sites, but some good recommendations (with notes on issues) are: Cloak your DNS. Believe it or not ISPs do track what requests you are making. This is pretty simple thing…

Ok just did the first part of a trip. We were off because of the rain by a little bit the model 3 was way off. The 265wh/ mi was way off as an estimate. We got that on the mainly flat super highway but with more load it was wrong and rain and then…

These are awesome jackets but the codes are bizarre. They have literally a n x m matrix of names. But here is what I’ve learned. They have product likes like Alpha and then a two character designation like these for hard shells: SL for super light. FL for fast and light. I don’t know what…

Wow this is a complicated topic, but learning from Sam, one of the unsung cores to good software development is reproducibility. On any machine, you should be able to run and not have dependencies in software get you. But, there is a cost to full reproducibility. At the limit having to set up an entire…

Oh be careful, in the course of getting things right, I unassigned a domain. If you do this and your domain has email accounts, then all those account disappear from cpanel. You can get them back, phew, just by assigning again, but don’t be confused.

Having a long credit history is super important for things like mortgages. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to get started. Here are some tips, assuming that you are a responsible person and will not go crazy, this is just for building credit, not for actually using them. For College There are two cards that…

Well it’s time of year. Also know as the REI 4th of July sale for the get ready for the heart of summer sales. If you are in the market, there are quite a few consumable to get. As usual Outdoor Gearlabs is a great source. For true hiking socks, the Darn Tough Hiker Full…

Ok, so I’ve had a UPS on my main computer and also for the network box and the burglar alarm. We also have a smaller backup battery set for the alarm itself. But as with all things, they do seem to give out. It really does want make me want to just get a PowerWall…

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…