Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well if you are getting back into cycling, it’s a great time to instrument up and DC Rainmaker has the best reviews and for apparel the most important thing is a good big with a good pad Bike computer. I have an old Garmin Edge 800, but many folks are loving the new Wahoo Elemnt…

Well you do run out of power all the time, then here are some good choices: MacBook Magsafe and special tip. This is the only system that I found where you have a plug in and it works directly to charge a MacBook Pro MagSafe (pre 2016). Also this system uses a five pin adapter, so…

Time once again to look at SD cards as on a shoot you don’t want to run out or have ones that are too slow. The main news here is the increase in performance to U.3 UHS II which is 250MBps way above the previous 80-100MBps on U:1 UHS I. In looking at the reviews,…

Well now that I’m settling down on USB C connectors, time once again to look at various peripherals: Mantiz Venus. Ok this is expensive at $400, but it a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with room for an nVidia 1080Ti graphics card for instance. It also include full 87 watt power delivery on the USB C cable.…

OK, so this is a dumb one, I was looking for a shared folder that someone had sent me, a couple of notes: When you get a share, you want to make sure you choose Share and do *not* create a link and share that. The former semantics are that this is a synchronized copy.…

OK, just went through this again and I blogged it, but here are some of the quick notes: When you get the Edge Router, the first thing you should do is to upgrade the firmware. The EdgeRouter POE installation didn’t have any Wizards, so you need to go to the System menu at the bottom…

Well the world has moved way beyond the clipart of Microsoft PowerPoint, so now what’s a person to do if they want really great artwork and beautiful slides. TL;dr First get pretty icons to with Gsuite, you need to export them to WMF and stick them in Google Drawing The Noun Project. This is *the*…

This drone has been sitting around for a year, so now it’s time to see how to get it back to life. It isn’t super easy as all the firmware is out of date, so here’s goes a long evening of fixing things: Getting the batteries charged, there is a charger with two outputs, pop…

I’ve been using Unify for home installations for a while now, so here are some notes on how to use them: Do not just hit the buttons willy nilly. Some like UAPSD can cause big problems as the Wifi access points power down. The admin console is pretty nontraditional, basically, you have a dedicated machine which…

This seems like it would be so easy, you can do it if you load it into iMovie, but if you want to do it really quickly, you have to use 5 year old software. mpegstreamclip does this, you just load the file and choose Extract/Video and it works. Useful if you want to just…

Well windows has sure gotten more complicated. Getting telnet running take three steps  You need to run the Super Administrator mode for the command line. This is pretty hidden right now particularly if you are Running a windows tablet and it is not clear how to right click. The trick is to long press and…

Well if you want to capture multiple videos from a Mac and potentially mix them here are some applications to try: Capturesync. Best Software has this, in experimenting, it is nice because it puts all of the video into a single file. Since it is recasting files it is CPU intensive. Works fine with three…

Well it seems pretty clear the Mavic Pro is the most awesome drone right now, but as usual, you need a host of accessories. The drone was really hard to get a launch, but now there are bunch of places which will set you back about $1500 mainly for the batteries. DJI Mavic Pro. This…

Well since I’ve been buying so much now’s a great time to ask how to optimize for purchases. Two pointers: Amazon. You can get 3 JetBlue Points per Amazon purchase just by clicking through. That’s about a 5% discount. You can also get a straight 5% off by using an Amazon Store Card, so that’s…

OK, for the third time this year, I’m outfitting someone’s home with enough of a backend that they should be relatively stable, here’s a guide to how to do this: The right NAS Synology DS216J. There are a host of models that Synology has, but even the most basic $170 computer gives you a RAID-1…

Well it’s time once again to make USB boot disks, I’ve been using Diskmaker X forever, but with Sierra, there are some idiosyncratic things: Download from the Mac App Store the Sierra download. This will take a while as it it is over 4GB, but this is the image that Diskmaker X uses. Make sure…

For a while I could not get file transfer to work from an Android phone. Tried: Take a movie and use Google Photos to upload, this was incredibly slow trying to get 4GB up there. Same with a OneDrive upload Airdroid uses Bluetooth to do the same and it was way too slow Trying Android…

Ok, when you get a new car, here are some tips and tricks: If you have a fancy high resolution GPS like the Vsport, then you will see lots of dropouts, so you need a GPS antenna and ideally it should be on the roof. The so called ground plane cuts down the multipath reception…

Nothing like waiting 30 years between buying bikes. Finally brad got me back so I’ve been trying bikes for theee days solid. Great interval training! Thoughts are to read the reviews. There are many good ones so I’ll stack rank the important things Budgets. Well this is the hard one but there are definitely shelf…

This is the first time I’ve had this problem, but basically Spotlight indexing is working, but Mac Mail doesn’t seem to ever find anything. I’m not the first person with this problem. But the fix doesn’t seem to work. Doing a rebuild and then deleting the index doesn’t help. I also tried just deleting all…

Been outfitting a car so get to learn about Gps antennas. The one hertz ones in phones are fine and use all kinds of damping 2 to get higher precision you need a better box. Vbox is 20 hertz. But often disconnects. Try an MCX connector to an external gps. You need to mount at…

Ok I’ve loaded way too many apps. 42GB worth to be precise. One side effect is that spotlight search gets really slow. I’m sure there’s a bad app in there somewhere but try to keep it down. 

Ok, some projects for this year; 55″ Gaming Monitor and nVidia 1080Ti. Last year, we discovered thanks to rtings.com that televisions are great displays. Ended up buying 40″ 4K Samsung monitors for $600 that are just awesome for showing 4 or even six full windows of code. This year, the discovery is the curved displays and…

With an Apple phone you can recover through iCloud, by with Google Nexus 5 (as well as Pixel) you can still Go through the debug sequence. Which at its base involves turn the phone on with the sequence by holding volume down while pressing power. This will put you into debug mode. Select the right…

It seems like once a month, I get asked what to install in typical home (that is where nerds to do not live 🙂 so here is the advice: Make sure you have a great access point. There is such a temptation to just get a $50 router, but with all the wifi signals out…

OK with a few months now of Nexus 5X, MacBook Pro (late 2016) and the new Logitech Brio, here’s a recommendations based on the longer article on long term cords to get in this conversion to USB C connectors for your every day carry (EDC), with the goal being to have two of everything with the…

It’s been a few years since I’ve really had to shoot a big event, but next month, I do need some neat gear. Lensrentals.com (they are having a 10% discount if you order for the summer)  has been a great site for getting things like sport telephotos TL;DR Shooting Canon (and Sony too) is something…

Well, I don’t know how well Apple has really debugged their iCloud Photo Library but here is what I see: Even though I have several phones, iPads and MacBooks set to iCloud Photo Library, they all show different versions of files store on top. When you get to a particular system, for instance my main…

We’ve had this bug on several Macs so far, but the symptoms are, the Mac refuses to synchronize up to iCloud, it says you need gobs and gobs of space, but when you look at the photos, there are not nearly that many . Even if you completely deleted everything out of Photos and get…

Well, for a variety of reasons, I’m using the Windows 10 and SurfaceBook with Performance Base (what a name?!). Anyway, here are the key learnings: The gooseneck thing is a little weird to use in actual practice. It doesn’t fold down flat and you want move the screen all the way back. I’m an idiot…