Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

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…