Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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).

Ok this must truly be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. We have a brand new radar detector and it mysteriously stopped working. Turns out that the lighter adapter has a mini-blade 2 amp fuse in it. There is a easy to push button which releases it. So next time your Valentine doesn’t work, look…

I’ve been getting terrible hangs on Safari (running latest Sierra), but not with Google Chrome. I’m pretty sure this is related to UBlock Origin, but thought I would try debugging: Clear all history. This will wipe out your cookies Disable WebGL. I’m not sure this all matters but did it. We are running UBlock Origin…

OK, a few folks have asked me what the best machine is for compiling things like the Linux kernel. Turns out the answer isn’t super intuitive, but the new AMD Ryzen has just been a monster at doing this. They have more cores and more threads, ECC for big memory and overclocking. All things that…

OK, I don’t know how many New York Subway cards I have that have expired, so here are two solutions: If you have an expired MetroCard with money in it, take it to the subway station and they will give you a new card for free. EasyPay. If you don’t get there often enough, use…

Ok, so you’ve got a MacBook Pro and you need a battery pack, the main issues are: For the older MacBooks, getting something with a Magsafe connector. For the MacBook 2016 and later, you need something that does high speed USB C charging. Most chargers will charge at 5V x 2A or 10 watts, but…

There’s no doubt that if you are typing 12 hours a day, having a crappy keyboard is really frustrating.  A few quick notes. While the Apple keyboards for instance do work are OK, the true aficionado needs a mechanical keyboard. So here are some reviews. Hobgear is one person’s view. Note that these are “compact”…

Well a few tricks here to double dip: Cashbackmonitor.com doesn’t work on gift cards mainly because they are largely excluded from rebates. However, MileagePlus X is explicitly all about gift cards, so check there first for deals. As an example AMC is a 5x bonus with a 25% additional bonus if you hold a United…

Sometimes when you boot your MacBook particularly in some recovery modes it will forget the cached FileVault credentials. You then get thrown into a strange mode where it says it forgets and asks for FileVault password. And says you forgot your password.  Actually it’s not you. It’s the macOS which has lost the encrypted disk…

OK, this is a little convoluted, but Happy Fathers Day here is how it works (hat tip to TPG) but here’s some documentation on a promotion that ended June 16, keep on the look out for more, but the basic idea is you find a retailer that is on both the United Portal and also…

It’s been so long since I’ve printed (in facts, four years since that’s the last time I posted how to do this!). But here’s a reminder of how to do it: Go to the Ilford site and download the ICC profile that matches your paper to your printer. Look at the paper and find the…

Well, training by heart rate has been something that has been around for decades now, but whats the magic maximum heart rate. Turns out the traditional formula 210 – Your Age is at best an approximation. So here’s what Lifehacker says: In your twenties, 210-Age works and this is how the formula was first fit If you…