Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

This has been driving me crazy for years. But Preview has an idea about groups of photos, so if you open up a subset and then later a bigger set of photos, it opens multiple windows. The fix is pretty easy as Daily Motion points out, just start Preview and go into the settings and…

Well this has been a strange set of events, suddenly one of our Unifi APs reports that it is in isolation mode. I had no idea what it was. The one report said that it was possible that the network cable was bad. The symptom is that you reboot the AP and it looks OK,…

Yes you can get lots of different bands (although this Apple Watch Series 3 Nike band is actually pretty awesome, looks good and is comfortable). But as usual, there are some things you should really have according to Wareable and PC Magazine: Topvision combo Watch and USB Charger. What a good idea, combine a USB…

Wow, while Apple may not be the revolutionary company of Steve Jobs, overall in the industry, they still lead the way on making things simpler. I used Apple Watch Series 1 initially and it was so confusing with this landscape of little tiles, but using WatchOS4 is so much more natural and the setup is…

These cards are pretty amazing. When you pair a Chase Ink with a Chase Sapphire, you can get 5x points instead of 5% back, that is worth 11% off (assuming 2.2 cents/point). There is a $75K cap per credit card for this, but you can multiple Chase Ink cards for each LLC and for each…

About 5 minutes after you buy a cable you will probably forget how much data and how much power it can carry. Unlike all previous generations there are all kinds of limitations as and differences that you can’t see. The basic problem is the amount of amperage and the data rates for cables differ and…

I don’t know about High Sierra but with Sierra, the latest encrypted PDFs just show up as greyed documents in the MacOS Preview and even if you file open in Safari. They do work in Adobe Acrobat Reader and also in Chrome. Seems like Apple needs to update their encrypted reader. If you actually want…

Well the Anker 60-watt USB C Charger with 3 USB A ports is half the price and seemed to work well. Sadly, it just “loud popped” and failed. You can actually hear the capacitor that blew up rattling around inside. Sometimes half the price with more features is not the answer. I was using it…

Ok if you are outfitting a new apartment, there are so many things to get, here’s a quick summary: Tools. Well, if you want to get fancy, you can get either a basic kit from Home Depot for $20, a bigger kit for $60 from Amazon or if you want something that will last pick…

Every time they change iTunes there is a change to how you look at things, the latest is that when you create a Playlist, it comes up in Playlist mode and you can’t change the track order. Also the track order for recently played is by Artist which makes no sense. You can click all…

OK here are a list of dumb things: If you want to connect it to your wifi, make sure that you have 802.11/bg enabled. I had it turned off because I literally can’t think of device that needs it and it slows down 802.11n as I recall. Best to have an access point in the…

For some reason this is one big blind spot for Ubuntu and the like, getting these dongles to work is a pain: On Ubuntu 14.04, I got the DWA-182 working by installing drivers. It uses the rtl8812au driver and you have to modprobe that in actually find a repo by abperiasamy to make it work.…

Figuring out charger you should get at home is pretty complicated and if you want to charge from a variety of different locations away from home at grandmothers or at a shop, this is even more confusing. There are three steps: a) figure out the maximum intake rates of your car and then b) get…

Wow, Mike, thanks so much for the Hook Up to T-mobile. I can’t quite believe how well it has gone. Basically we pay half as much as we did with Verizon and the features seem endless, but if you are a T-mobile subscriber, then you do need to get on the billing page and make…

This actually works for any Cherry MX keyboard with Cherry MX stabilizers on the big buttons. I’ve been trying to figure out the ideal keyboard. The Cherry Green has an awesome click, but my fingers literally got tired from the 0.65N force required. So I got $15 Cherry dampeners. These are the lights variety that…

Seems like semi-aero is the way to go and I’ve got a bunch of standard tubes that don’t have enough stem to inflate properly. You need about 10mm to make sure that a presta tire pump works. ENVE has a nice table for this but basically Standard rim is 25mm high (an inches). Use standard…

With all the notes on security, figuring out what a good vpn has been hard and you probably do not want to use those $50 for life services, seems to be good to be true, so in looking over reputable providers: Private Internet Access. We’ve been using them for year, but sadly over the last…

iOK, it takes forever, but I finally have the complete decoder ring for what you need to charge most EVs at home. TL;dr If you have a Bolt EV In stall a NEMA 14-50R plug (these are $8 parts, but you want an electrician since you will need a 50 amp circuit breaker). While you…

It has been at least 15 years since I last built up an AMD machine. We’ve looked at it over the years, but although AMD has been cheaper, they never had the single core performance that was even close and they chewed up power. Now however things have changed with their latest processors. They use…

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.…