Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Well now that we don’t have privacy, here’s a quick review of what to do to harden your Mac: Install 1Password using Dropbox because it’s a pain to remember all the passwords. Turn on System Preferences/Security & Privacy/FileVault. This encrypts your hard disk, so in evil hands, they at least need your password. Turn on…

OK, I admit it I mainly use Vi for editing mainly because it is just so fast to edit things from the keyboard. You don’t ever need to leave the keyboard when moving around. It is arcane and terrible yet, I actually got running (thanks syntactic) an coding environment that let’s you lint and then run…

Not simplest thing to find because instruction seem to vary, but on the latest vuescan, here is all you need to do: Put a page in and press preview when it looks good press scan For each succeeding page press preview and then  scan + When you are done you don’t have to push save or anything,…

I’ve got now five homes where I’m helping folks run their networks. Unifi is pretty awesome because you can configure the AP at home and then take it to someone and it is completely configured for them. It is so unlikely that a regular human can figure out the access point systems, so it is…

Well with privacy always under assault, besides a VPN, you need an Adblocker and tracking masker. Here are some choices: Ublock Origins. This isn’t regular Ublock (which isn’t developed anymore), but a new fork that has a Safari build. Adguard is another one which gets good user reviews Then the ones that are questionable as…

Now that there are no limits for ISPs on reselling your personal browsing and other information. What can a person do. Well the easy things are: Buy a VPN. You need a reputable one. I’ve used Private Internet Access for years and they seem pretty reliable. The main issue is that with iPhones as you…

Well, if you are a Chevy Bolt owner and wonder what all those parameters mean, here’s a little bit of a decoder ring (it is incredible in this day and age that even with all that infotainment, there isn’t a simple thing like a Tooltip to tell you what a setting means), but fortunately there…

Now that there is no more privacy in the US (because ISPs can freely resell all your access information). Here is what you can do to protect yourself: Get a VPN. There are many that are not so reputable, but Private Internet Access and ExpressVPN seem at least more reputable. You have to load them…

You can use picture in picture if a web site programs it or use PIPifier from Mac Apps. It’s really convenient for any HTML5 video so it works like iPads. The easiest way to install it is to brew install mas which is Mac App Store command line interface, find the id of it from a…

Well, if I have frustrated by all that horrible spam and Bluehost have been great but even with Spam Experts and Spam Assassin, we still get way more spam. I originally just wanted to make Gsuite just filter messages and send them back to Bluehost for deliver, it turns out that this is actually impossible. You…

Hat tip to my Tesla friends, while Washington doesn’t have nearly the incentives that California does for electric vehicles, they do have $500 off of a level 2 ev charger. Hard to find, but once you do super worth it. Also you can get power strips that reduce vampire draw for $10, also a good…

I have not seen this discussed too much, but we use iCloud Photo Library extensively to save old photos. We try to stay in the free 5GB tier, so the algorithm is: Use iCloud Photo Library like the old Photostream, but it saves all photos up to the 5GB limit. Every so often get on…

If you are getting a new car, here are some indispensable accessories to go with it: Tire Pressure Gauge. It’s huge but it is reliable and easy to use. All analog and no batteries. LED Flashers. Yes you need batteries, but they are way better than flares Flashlight. You need a bright one and Candlepower…

If you have a company and you are merging or getting acquired, then what’s the easiest way to get the data across. Turns out this is a little tricky. But the basic things to understand are: There is the concept of an owner for a file. This is the user who sets permissions. However, you…

You would think there would be an easy FAQ if you have an Electric Vehicle, turns out that after navigating through all the many sites, here are the easy steps, if you aren’t lucky enough have the plug and play Tesla. First the plug nightmare As usual with the start of an industry there are…

1. Right now the easiest thing to do is to get a NAS box which supports 4-12 bays. I personally use Synology for this, they are reasonably cheap and they keep their linux based system up to date. (You can even run docker containers on it). Idk how much future proofing you do, but right…

Wow now that UltraHD is now a thing and you can buy UHD Blu-ray, how do you think about encoding all of this. Well here are some of the things to know: X.265 (aka HEVC). This is the latest encoding format. Think of it as life beyond X.264 (aka MPEG-4). It is about twice as…

If you like your spiffy new mechanical keyboard but want to use it on a Mac, you need to map the Command key and Option key around because on a Mac, it goes Control, Alt or Option and then Command whereas on a Windows keyboard it is Control, Windows-Key and then Alt. This is really…

Google Drive has some pretty hard to understand semantics when it comes to sharing folders and files. When a file or folder is shared with you, they are not synced to your desktop, they live in a special place called ‘Shared With Me’ So they do not take any of your disk quota (much better…