- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
Amazing Credit Card deals
Chase Sapphire Reserve. Effectively $150 per year ($450 plus $300 for any travel expense). 100K signup bonus. 3x points for any restaurant or travel including Airbnb. That’s effectively a 6.3% discount. Plus you get Priority Select for access to 900 lounges around the world. And if you redeem for flight using the Chase portal you…
-
High Resolution Audio on Macs and iPhones needs iTunes conversion and DAC
OK, I recently had the chance to get a high resolution audio soundtrack, it is a 24-bit/48KHz sound track, so quite a bit better than the compressed MP3s that most folks listen too. But how it is actually pretty hard to make sure you can listen to it and use it. There are a few…
-
Messages in iCloud
This is actually a pretty useful feature. Right now on my phone I have 2GB of vidéos and junk stuck on my phone. And if I delete a message on the phone it stays on my Mac. Now if you update to iOS 11.4 and macOS 10.3.5, then this is solved. First enable iOS. message…
-
Two days in Seattle
Someone was asking me, if you wanted to spend three days in Seattle what would you do? Well first thing is that it is very expensive to stay in Seattle itself plus assuming that you will have a car, they charge another $20-40 for parking, so Bellevue is a good option. You need to take…
-
Accessories for your Model 3 (or Model X for that matter)
Ok listening to “ride the lightning” by Ryan McCaffrey has been great. That guy is awesome as are the many folks on teslamotorsclub.com. Anyway if you have a brand new Model 3, here are some things to think about getting: Qi Charger There is a really cool pad made by Jeda that fits right in…
-
Tesla batteries 18650 vs 2170
Well it is pretty incredible that all these fancy cars are basically filled with AA Lithium Ion batteries, that’s not exactly completely true, but there is nothing that special. Here’s the scoop on batteries. The current Model X and S have 18650 Lithium Ion batteries. These are standard batteries that are 18mm in diameter and…
-
Mac Photos scans for faces and objects
Wow this is a pretty cool feature I had no idea about. I’ve uploaded 50K photos (and 1K videos) into iCloud Photo Library. Now Mac Photos is silently analyzing them all for images. For those of you worried about privacy, all the photos are encrypted and Apple cannot see them. One of the problems is…
-
Waiting out Tesla and other EV improvements
Well, now that the Model 3 production is so well covered, time now to think about what happens in 2019 and 2020 with the new cars coming. Unlike traditional cars, electric vehicles are on an amazingly rapid timeline. While many of the changes (like full self driving) are mainly software improvements there are some key…
-
Gitlab protects master branches
Ok still learning the differences between Github and gitlab. The good news is that the basic git commands do work properly between them, but the semantics are a little different. The biggest difference is that GitHub.com is completely flat, there is no hierarchy of repos, whereas with gitlab, you can have arbitrary nest of projects and…
-
Massive folders in /var/folders
Well, we have one Mac with just (I can’t believe I’m saying just), 256GB of SSD. This is not very much because the system and applications need about 60GB and then with iCloud Photo Library and other sundries, it is hard to stay below 120GB. The solution have been an external drive with a RAID1…
-
Seattle to San Diego Road Trip!
Well we’ve been up and down the I-5 corridor I don’t know how many times but a dear friend asked me what are some great stops on a 10 day journey from Seattle all the way down the coast. Here are some suggestions. As luck would have it USA Today just published a piece on…
-
MacBook Pro High Sierra Update Fails if Encryption not complete
Ok one thing that folks don’t cover is that if you try to do a High Sierra upgrade (and probably any other upgrade), you get strange results if you have not complete FileVault Encryption. One of our MacBook Pro’s was in the middle of doing encryption and then we tried to run an upgrade. The…
-
Using an old Garmin 800 when Garmin Connect cannot sync
I have an old Garmin 800 and trying to get it to run on the Mac is not simple. Here are the quick tips. First you need the Garmin Express drivers, the easiest way for geeks is to run brew install Garmin-connect or go to the site and download it. Then you want to connect the…
-
PowerTap P-1 Pedal a year later, cleat covers and Stages Power LR alternative
Wow, pretty amazing that all that technology can fit into a single set of pedals, but these things really do reliably report power to a Garmin 800 cyclocomputer (if only getting the data out of that thing was as easy, but that’s another post). Note that these thing do take Lithium AA batteries, so order…
-
Moving from Google Contacts to Apple
If you are concerned about security, the new scheme where Apple cannot see your contacts, calendars and photos, but it isn’t super easy to move things. So here’s a quick list for how to do it. Moving Contacts There are really two steps to move your contacts. First go to google.com/contacts and export the contacts into…
-
Tesla Trip Planning and estimating efficiency
Now that we’ve had a Tesla for a while, I’m finally understanding how to do route planning. A Better Route Planner is an awesome tool, but it needs some critical data to really estimate where you will need to charge. This thing is awesome because it takes into account elevation and hills so that you…
-
iPhone X best price and accessories
Now that we’ve had a Tesla for a while, I’m finally understanding how to do route planning. For 99.9% of all people, the built in route planning in today’s Tesla maps is pretty incredible. Just plug in where you want to go and if you need to stop, it tells you which Tesla Supercharger and…
-
Managing Automotive Gates
If you ever have the misfortune to get to manage a facility that has gates, good luck. Here’s a quick note for those of you that do, along with how to get something that is maintainable. As usual, the language is the main barrier here to success. In ground operator. This is the most beautiful but…
-
Graduation gifts
Well time once again to look at buying MacBook Pros. They are working on their mid 2017 model right now so if you are thinking about getting one, here are some things to know assuming you are using your computer for mainly web browsing, photos and not super heavy stuff. Things to delete To save…
-
Sharing audiobooks
Sadly this is way harder than you would think. Audible for instance does allow book sharing, but only with one other adult in your Amazon Household. The other option is to use Overdrive and borrow from a library. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to buy an audiobook for everyone 🙁
-
Honda Fit Battery Replacement
Wow, I had forgotten how complicated it can be to do the simple stuff. In this case, quite a few of our cars have had terrible problems with batteries. One nice thing about electric vehicles by the way is that they are a lot harder to ruin. But over the years, we’ve had lots of…
-
Archival Formats: JPEG 2000 vs HEIC
OK, I switched to using JPEG-2000 in 16-bit mode lossless for archiving images, this brings a 5400 dpi 35mm slide from 220MB to about 150MB. Moreover, you can also create a 16-bit lossy one and you get 16-bits. Now that many camera phones can record more than 8-bit color (the iPhone is 10-bit), Apple has…
-
Ultimate Directions Kicker Valve
OK, if the zombie apocalypse ever comes, I will definitely die of thirst because without this video, I could never figure out how to drink from the Ultimate Directions Kicker Valve. There are two tricks. First, because it is a bottle for running, you have to pull the valve out with your teeth (Argh). And…
-
Monthly Car Sales
Wow it is amazing how much data just lives out in the real world. Someone was just asking me about car sales and a quick google got me to a bunch of sites that track sales amazingly closely… Overall View The Wall Street Journal has their own overview of car sales because it is such…
-
Bicycling Accessories Recommendations
Well, it’s spring again finally and all those little things I didn’t get last year, I’m determined to get for this year, so here are some recommendations. Arm Warmers Yes these don’t really wear out, but I keep losing them, so there are quite a few to choose according to Cycling Weekly from the Carney…
-
Apple Photo Scanning
OK, there is not much written about this, but Apple has a highly private (they don’t look at your photos), scheme for doing both object and face detection across iPhone and Mac. It is hard to figure out how it all works and there don’t seem to be any papers written about it that summaries…
-
Quick Tips: Google Slides Tranparency and MacOS Airplay
Spent the day working on presentations, so learned a few easy things: First is that when you use Google Slides, it’s really good for collaboration but quite different from Mac PowerPoint for graphics. Buy yourself a subscription to Noun Project. This is a great set of icons that you can load. Goto Google Slides and…
-
DJI Osmo Mobile 2 Simple Workflow
OK, I’ve recorded three events with the DJI Osmo Mobile 2. It’s a nice $129 stabilized mount that fits an iPhone X pretty much perfectly. There are quite a few tricks to using it, so here’s a short list of notes. Setting up The thing is actually pretty hard to figure out. The instructions are…
-
iPhone Audio Recording
Well, the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 is an incredible stabilized mount for doing recordings at live events with an iPhone, the video quality is unbelievable and the controls are great, but the sound quality is just so, so. The iPhone has just a small monophonic microphone, so that’s one thing to fix. Here are some…
-
Cool Deals: Digital Subscriptions
The Washington Post This is normally $10/month, but with Amazon, you get a deal where it is $4/month after a six month trial for Amazon Prime member. Nice! Photo by charlotte on Unsplash