Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Suddenly all of the managed sites I have have gone “white”. That is WordPress just returns nothing to a curl. This is apparently a very common thing and there are three common issues: You are out of PHP memory You have a bad plugin You have a bad theme. Change back to a default them…

I’ve been using a combination of bluehost.com with phpgallery for private photos plus iCloud Photo sharing, but there are two problems: Bluehost.com shared hosting is just unbearably slow for this purpose, not surprising given the low fee, even with unlimited storage it takes a long time to load and managing the gallery is definitely a…

Well I haven’t crashed the drone yet, but now it’s time to get the most quality video and photos from it, first some dumb things: For a long time I could not figure out how to change the resolution of the camera. I kept on going to the upper right settings menu and the only…

I’ve been having this strange problem with Ubuntu 16.04 in VMware Fusion where it eventually fail with a graphics mode failure, it was horrible to debug but this is what helped: First when you have this kind of hang, see if you can get just a terminal windows with CTRL-ALT-F1. Now this is tricky on…

Wow this has gotten way easier thanks to cooksillustrated.com, sweethome.com and consumerreports.org. Subscriptions are required for the first and last but totally worth it: Tramontina. This is the Walmart.com has a knockoff Allclad triple-ply pans that can last a lifetime. For a limited time $109 gets you a set of 8 (really four pots). Tramontina…

Suppose you want to use Gsuite, but for low volume accounts you do not want to pay the $10/month. Here is what to do: Sign up for Gsuite for your vanity domain. Go to Gsuite/Apps/Mail/Routing and add a custom route with an additional recipient which is a free personal gmail account. At this point, you…

Well most of the time you have to use some sort of VPN to get back into your machine, but you can also use your Synology for SSH port jumping (if you dare!). Here’s how: Enable SSH with Control Panel/Terminal & SNMP/Enable SSH Service Enable Home folders with Control Panel/User/Advanced/Enable User Home. You have to…

Ok this has to be the most undiscoverable feature in any product: Google Slides doesn’t have a ruler so if you have a bullet and want to remove it, you still have a hanging indent. The solution is to go the line and hit backspace there is an invisible character there which controls the indenting. One…

Then the make geek thing these days, mechanical keyboards. tl;DR There are an incredible number of guides from keyboard.co, but here are some models to consider, it is nice to have them backlit I find, but here is a list of top models to consider sorted by price: WASD Keyboard Tester. If you are really not…

Man it took me a month to figure this out. I’ve loved Synology for a long time, but for the first time I’ve had a serious problem. We have has the 1812+, the 2413+ and I got a little 216j. Everything was working fine until. But then I got an upgrade message and tried to…

Ok for the true power geek, here are the USB C accessories you need. The main things to do are to look for cables with USB-IF certified and e-Marker chips and take the advice on sorting your cable capabilities by length since USB C cables all look the same but have very different speed differences.…

Well if you don’t just want to go to your neighborhood Starbucks, what if you want really great coffee. Well, we tried olive reviews online, so why not try coffeereview.com. This is one of those sites where I’m not sure how legit it is, but for a $15 investment, it’s worth it to find out.…

Just watched Arrival. Wow what an interesting story line. Turns out Ted Chiang is a tech writer in Seattle and he posts much of his work online. Plus he’s won four Nebulas. Thats pretty amazing!

Well it’s summer so if you need some fun , then the Wirecutter did a nice review of soakers, the sad thing is that original pressurized soakers are no more. Laramie got acquired by Hasbro and they stopped making them and prevented peopleprevented peoplehttp://www.isoaker.com/Info/2015/01/20150102-super-soaker-is-dead.php from using their patent. Sad! Nerf SquallNerf Squall. Lots of quality…

One of the big things happening on Amazon is that specialty food folks are using it for distribution. How convenient to great olive oils or to read Coffee Reviews and get highly rated beans with JB Roasters having lots of them: Geisha. Apparently this is the creme de la creme. Tano Batek. From Sumatra  

We’ve had really great luck with Unifi and the access points are cheap and easy to manage. Now that there are mesh systems, perhaps this will change (the Eero is supposed to be great), but for the price, nothing is as good. However, as we added more users and intensity, suddenly the “square” Unifi AP…

We’ve had good luck with the Haswell-E Xeon 1650 v3 with the ASUS X99-WS motherboard. We get a full 16 lanes of PCIe to four slots and it is very fast. Plus it has ECC for all the memory we have added. These have been great for machine learning, for computer simulation of cars and…

Well we’ve finally run out of our stock from Europe, so off to the internet to find more. I don’t know if nyoliveoil.com is a scam, but they do have a list of top brands and things that are best in category. Ordered some and we shall see!

OK, I had a whole bunch of spurious network adapters stuck in my macOS Sierra network preferences, so I deleted them expected that USB discover would bring them back. Well, I then got a strange error message: Would you like <Insert name of adapter> to return next time it is connected to your Mac? Not…

It used to be really complicated to mount a television on the wall, now that televisions are so small and light, it’s pretty easy you just need: Television mount. The best are tilting stands. If you have the little bit of space, this $85 unit also swivels a little which is useful if you get…

Wow there are lots of things to think about for hard disks, the main one is the warranty and performance. Paying a little more for an enterprise drive makes some sense for a consumer because you are not BackBlaze. A failure takes time to resolve and with RAID arrays too many of them and you…

Ok with 10TB hard disks and 10^16 UBER, you really can’t build raid arrays anymore, because a complete read of a 10TB disk is very likely to have an unrecoverable bit error. So what’s a person to do? Well two strategies for a 12 disk array (like the Synology DS-1512): Install RAID-1 SSDs, this is…

OK this must be the adventures of dining weekend, but if you are making fresh (vs farmed salmon), you should use a slightly lower temperature for doneness. Cook’s Illustrated recommends 120 degree F for wild salmon and 125 for farmed (blech! don’t get farmed, not good for the environment, Alaska wild caught is best).

We use these rescue traps and there are two flavors of traps for the Rescue: A water trap that uses an attractant and then a vial that you put into water. Then below another vial where you can buy a 10 week supply that is $5 from Amazon. Or a 2 week supply where you…

We have seven Samsung televisions masquerading as computer monitors in the office, so getting them to work is a challenge. Here are some cool things to do: The remote does not like having lots of televisions in the same room. Something as simple as scrolling doesn’t seem to work. You can power it on and…

If you are lucky enough to spend $500 for a 43″ (?!!) 4K monitor, you will find that managing the windows is just terrible, fortunately, Alex has studied this and there are a few solutions: Divvy (http://mizage.com/divvy/) which let’s you split the screen into a “grid” so that you don’t have to deal with overlapping…

Well, it is so confusing monitors. it took some digging, but it looks like the Samsung MU6300 has a pretty special screw requirement. For a different model of Samsung, they need a M8x45mm course threading (1.25mm/thread). The 45mm is an estimate, but it is definitely deep. The mounting doesn’t have any of these screws so…

I love the insider hookup and the service (particularly in big cities like Seattle),  but be careful when you add a new line, we just did and there are some peculiarities with doing this: Even if you have Autopay enabled, it will not give you the Autopay discount unless you call. This is apparently because…

Well, if you are thinking about alternatives to UIber, Lyft isn’t bad, and for a limited time, you get 15 JetBlue points per ride and 1 Delta per dollar spent point overtime you ride (it’s 3 points for rides to the airport on Delta).