Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

A funny thing to post on a snowy day like today, but if you are looking for some different routes, then Cascade Bike Studio has a whole collection of ones they’ve put onto Strava.

Well trying to read these papers and my intuition is just never too strong on what is really happening, but found:  Colah who gives really good examples of what is happening. He explains how networks basically are contorting things so that you can divid thing linearly. A great set of illustrations Max Pechyonkin. He does…

This is actually a pretty complicated topic, there are cheap duffel bags that you can get for $25 at Columbia for instance, but if you look at Outdoor Gear Labs, you can spend a lot more to get a lot more. The truth is that I’ve had the same duffel for literally decades and it…

When you are working on blog or a site, the typeface really does make a difference. Yes, you can just use Arial and be fine, but with Google Fonts, there are literally thousands of free fonts available just about anywhere. So what’s a person to do if they are not experts. Well, consult the internet…

I wanted to created a truly professional site, not just a blog, so my good friend Jim said that Elementor was the way to go. This made some sense, it is based on WordPress and thus easy to get something up and running quickly. So here are some hints: You need a good tutorial to…

Well since I’ve been doing way more documents lately, it’s time to take a look and see what fonts are available. Extensis has a great set of tools that you can loads as an add-on to Google Docs that let’s you browse and see what is popular and trending: Noto. This is one of the…

Well time for an update on keeping yourself safe from viruses on a Mac and all the bad folks out there. While the defaults are pretty good, you can always do better, here are the recommendations in a nutshell: Automatic Operating system. This is probably the most important one, but while there the risks of…

Well, I’ve been writing way more in Google Docs than anything else these days. The collaborative features makes it way easier to create documents, but there are still some things that you need to make it a world class environment. Here are some notes: Templates. The basic ones are pretty good, but they don’t really…

There are way too many bulbs in the world. In this case it’s a case of just unscrewing it. And then looking at the bulb type. It’s a wide base e26 base and it is a HR26 reflector. Hard to figure but it turns out I bought six the last time 🙂 — Read on…

Well most phones have this built in and there is a basic one in every copy of Lightroom and Photoshop, but I’ve found those ones are pretty basic. I’ve also used the open source Hugin. This seems to work pretty decently, but for a while, it wasn’t even working on the Mac, but the 2018…