Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well trying to get (finally!) through the CS223 class on Coursera and actually do the homework, etc. One of the nice things is that Coursera let’s you run the entire course offline on your phone. But one of the big issues is that they only let you run a version of MATLAB on the server,…

Well time once again to update how to process photos and videos. Life is a little more complicated when the inputs are: iPhone X. For most daily shots and really it is the easiest way to shoot panoramas and they come out pretty good looking at least for casual sharing. Sony A7R Mark III. This…

I didn’t realize this and the wrong card got charged for the annual Amazon Prime membership. Make sure you have the right one at Amazon Prime page, this is not the same as your regular orders page. You also want to turn on renewal reminders as well so you can look at it before it…

It is such a pain to create email alias with Gsuite. They have tried to fix this with some simplified things, but here is what you need to know: There is now a simplified UI to create an internal “Group”, this is what they call an email alias. They actually merge two ideas, the first…

With Excel when you want to concatenate strings you just use the overloaded plus sign, so =A3 + ” Hello” whould add the string hello to whatever is in cell A3. With Google Sheets, this doesn’t work, you need the use the ampersand, so =A3 & ” Hello” makes sense given the different heritages. One is from…

When you are a startup, your name and your website are going to change quite a bit. Here’s a way to make it all easier. First of all if you use Gsuite, it will be easier since it supports the idea of multiple domains. You can actually have the same person attached to multiple secondary…

Doing panoramas with dSLRs seems to be basically a lost art. I have  been using Hugin and then finally paid for PTGui, but there seems to be very little help for how to do this. I think the panorama modes in camera phones have really superseded all the copy and pasting that is needed to…

I’ve always seen lots of issues with this where the iPhone or the iMac doesn’t seem to connect correctly with various public wifi systems at a Starbucks or at an airport for instance. It is really hard to find any documentation on this, but here is what I’ve learned about public wifi sites that have…

Ok on my last four Alaska airlines legs, I’ve had three problems. We’ve always liked Alaska and they always seemed like the folks who had to try harder. However there have been changes to their upgrade system for frequent travelers that can definitely leave you stranded. You’ve been warned! Here are recommendations for what to…

Well, I normally just toss all my stuff into my bag, but about 10 years ago, a good buddy told me the key was not folding clothes but laying it out flat. So that works well when you don’t have to rummage, but lately, on longer trips constantly losing stuff just isn’t worth it. Packing…

This hasn’t happen in a long, long time, but I got a 500 error on the tongfamily.com site, which is pretty bad. The troubleshooting is pretty complicated, but it comes down to, on Bluehost.com: Make sure you have ssh access to the site. You should enable ssh access on the Bluehost.com Cpanel then upload you…

There are really too many, many choices right now in fonts. We’ve moved far beyond Helvetica and Times. For a while I was an Arial and Times New Roman fan because they looked like those famous fonts, but didn’t have the licensing problems. And there was a period where I just loved Garamond and Baskerville…

Wow Google Sheets really has gotten much better than I remember. I’ve been trying to do some forecasting and curve fitting and discover quite a few functions that make it easier, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a guide, so here you go Linear Regressions First, decide what curve you want to fit,…

OK what a great deal of confusion today, suddenly our ObiTalk not longer works. The connection to Google Voice has been awesome, but now when I try to dial, I get a fast busy and the outside line hangs up. So off to remember how this all works. It’s a little complicated. First off, Polycom…

Super annoying, but when I put the Mac to sleep and it wakes up in a different wifi network, then it will not reconnect. I have to reboot it to work. The symptom is that there is no DNS Server and It looks like no connection. There is nothing unusual in the console In researching…

OK having spent a year doing this, if you and your family are all iPhones and Macs, then this is a pretty good solution that is powerful and highly secure and private. That’s because Apple is one of the few companies that encrypts all your photos so they can’t see it. It has limitations, for…

Certain clients won’t be able to handle these. So if you lose access (it’s been reported for Lenovo Windows machines for instance) then you need to turn them off. You turn these on by going to the Unifi Controller Settings at the lower left and enabling Advanced Settings which include airtime fairness, bandsteering, minimum RSSI,…

I’ve actually never had a Kindle just crash. In this case, it was on the page to enter a PIN. The solution is pretty simple, if hard to find, but Amazon says, just hold the power button which is on the lower edge of the device down for 40 seconds. Then you release the button…

OK, I’ve been using Unifi for a while now and making it work properly has always been a bit of chore, particularly in managing what channels to put access points as that requires really looking at interference. But with the latest release, 5.10, this has become much easier: You can’t use the square access points…

Man talk about undiscoverable. The face and object recognition in Apple Photos is really pretty good but nearly impossible to find. Here are some quick tips To kick it into face recognition most select a photo and then swipe up. Don’t choose edit! You will see a list of faces that it finds. Click on…

Ok, it’s been a year since I’ve written down a recommendation for building a gigantic computer or any computer for that matter. I haven’t been building many of these now that a basic laptop like the MacBook Pro 15″ is so powerful. And I haven’t been doing much gaming and most of the machine learning…

Quizzes are a great way to engage website viewers, but what’s an easy way to make one. Unfortunately Elementor doesn’t have a quiz widget yet. For flashy shareable quizzes that can go viral, the reviews at themeisle and wpsuperstars.net seem to point to Thrive Quiz Builder as the flashiest. The pricing is complicated, but basically it is…

I used to use iThemes and WordFence together, but now they really do overlap so now I’ve disabled WordFence to simplify things. I still use Updraft Backup instead of the iThemes because it lets you connect to Google Drive or Dropbox. Source: The Best WordPress Security Plugins and Services 2019

Well in the old world, it was pretty easy, use a San Serif font like Helvetica for the headlines because it was bold and then a serif font like Times Roman for the type because serif is easier to read. Now with a zillion fonts, things have gotten way more complicated. There are font viewers,…

I’ve been looking for some fonts that look “colonial” or ancient. This led to finding IM Fell which are Google Free fonts that actually digitized from some existing tests done by Dr. John Fell that were cut in 1672 or so. The Fell Types: a history and some revival fonts created by Igino Marini using…

They have an awesome tool for linking in YouTube videos, just choose Insert Video and give it the URL. But not everything is on YouTube, how do you insert arbitrary videos? Well this is a hack, but basically insert a static image and then link it with Command-K to the video URL. This is not quite…

OK I have an old Spyder3 and they obsoleted it and the software with the latest versions of MacOS. I was about to buy a new $500 colorimeter, but then discovered that you can keep using the old hardware just by downloading an open source project called DisplayCAL. This is actually a graphical front-end to…

I never end up doing this right and try on the plane to edit a Google Slide and then discover it is not set for offline. This is really complicated when you get a bunch of different GMail ids for work, home and non-profits. Here’s the decoder ring for how to do this: For each…

While nearly everything is on the internet, lots of things (old books, technical papers) are written with PDF. The main problem is that I’m constantly moving back and forth between different devices, so what is the best solution for that problem. Well if you have Apple devices, the answer is pretty easy, the iOS Books…

Been using Zoom a bunch for recording and it is a “deep, deep” product, so here are some tips and tricks: Video Defaults https://zoom.us/account/setting. This is a buried feature, but useful for those of us in messy offices or homes. You have to enable it from the administrator console. It is in Account Settings, there…