Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

As some folks have discovered, only the $600 1650 V3 (Broadwell-ES) chip overclocks and it is now running on a test machine at 4.2GHz vs the stock 3.5GHz. This is the current best choice (although power consumption is much higher than for Skylake) if you want ECC and overclocking a relatively cheap part. If a…

Well Apple introduced it, the last analog remnant in the digital world is going away and with it the emergence of Bluetooth headsets to listen to music. Now don’t get wrong I love the current analog headsets and I have a slew of them: Shure headphones. I’ve actually forgotten the model numbers, but they are…

Well, I normally wear and old school mechanical watch (Hamilton rules!) mainly because I liked Interstellar (and it was the star of the show). But my Garmin tracking watch band broke, my Suuonto watch (thanks Brad!) finally gave up the ghost after 15 years, and I tried the Apple watch, but gave them away. So now…

Just spend a week getting to know relatives and sharing photos and I really reaped the rewards of weeks or maybe years of scanning old photos, but for many of us, getting a 35mm scanner and grinding through doesn’t make any sense. Nor does finding a VCR to digital recorder and cleaning your old videotape.…

As book-end to the advice for just starting out, here are some notes on getting that next job. As we get older, hopefully you’ve picked a great industry (if not, then see Notes on getting (re)started). But assuming you have a good set of expertise, how should you think about your next job. Most of…

A good buddy Duncan asked me about product development particularly in a startup. Seems like a common question. So here are my five let’s call it pearls of wisdom: Sorry this got stuck in inbox but a few quick thoughts that you might call the seven deadly sins of making products: It just ain’t clear…

Well this is not as easy as you think. The Google Android File Transfer doesn’t seem to work. It keeps complaining about not being to access USB. I didn’t have time to figure out what was wrong so tried some alternatives: Airdrop. This is a freemium product that is a little strange in that you…

I’ve been using an escort passport for years and it’s bee great but wirecutter is right the Vakenjne V-one is incredible. Super sensitive and the display although arcane is super useful. Seeing where the radar is coming from and also how many really helps situational awareness. A nice addition to machine kesnring is to add…

OK, some folks have asked me questions and while free advice is worth exactly what it costs, I thought I’d post some rules that at least have helped me. This is tuned for someone just starting out in the world and wondering what their career path should be… I have ten rules, but I’d summarize…

OK I’ve tried most of them and the latest was Avira. It really used a lot of CPU. My old favorite was ClamAVX but it became paid and was slow. Macworld UK suggest Sophos, so I’m back to that 🙂

Errata and Fixes Well these guys have a really useful tutorial, unfortunately, it has bugs in it and apparently my disqus comments keep getting rejected, so here is an errata sheet for the Fullstack React Tutorial. They are focused on their book and other content so not surprising, still if you want to use their…

Ok there has been lots of confusion on this topic, but it looks like the E5-1620 V3, the older Haswell-E, chip is locked. So it is stuck at 3.5GHz. This is confusing as some folks have multiplier unlocked 1620s. Strange. This processors have 4 cores and 8 threads. The 1630 is also not supposed to…

OK, if you type all day (like I do), you get quite opinionated about keyboards, here’s a list of my favorites: Corsair K70 Cherry Blue. $119. This is super noisy, but so much like the IBM Selectric or original IBM PC keyboard. All mechanical. We have a Cherry Red and it is great for gaming,…

Gave my escort 9500i away. It’s the third one. The other two were stolen out of the car. Remember to keep the glove compartment locked! Anyway time to look for a new one.  Wirecutter recommends the Valentine V1 for $400 direct. The patent on their directional lights expired but the $600 Escort Max is more…

Ok Apple may be past its prime but i am still amazed by its customer service. I hope someone else takes up the mantle.  We had a bad Thunderbolt connector on the motherboard and it was fixed in four days. Plus the screen was delaminating so that got repaired too.  Nice work and $300 saved.…

Well, this has been fun, I really love the Corsair 70 mechanical keyboard, but getting ti to work with a Mac is quite a trick, here are the two big things you need to do: The Windows and the Alt key are reversed on a PC Keyboard, so the Command key and the Option key…

Well it took some research but here’s the guide to watching the Olympics. Get an over the air antenna and hope you can see an antenna. If you can, then OTA is still free and it comes out on NBC. If you get a box then you can even make it a DVR. Not a bad…

If you go to China these days, you want to make sure that you have the right kind of masks. N95 is the designation for pollution masks that are good at filtering. Mybeijinghealth.com has some good recommendations: 3M N95 8210 Plus. These filter out 95% of particulate 2.5 microns or larger. $18 for 20, they…

Well this is a big topic, but I’ve been looking at CI products for a while now. We have some unique requirements that make it hard to pick one such as: 8GB of real memory for certain builds particularly Boost and QEMU Ability to install and run docker containers as the build system itself needs…

If you have a car and want all the modern amenities like bluetooth connection, here are your options: Really old car without auxiliary jack but with tape player. We just sold our car that was literally 20 years old. The only options seems to be either a bluetooth to FM transceiver or to a tape…

For whatever reason, this requires quite a few manual steps, but here’s why you want each because Verizon brands this HD Voice and you have to enable it on the Verizon site and then in the iPhone 6 or higher itself: voLTE. This brilliant acronym (voice over LTE) let’s you use voice and data on…

OK, if you are frustrated by the speed and more importantly reliability of that $20/month router you got from Xfinity, then there are really two ways to upgrade: Move to a serious consumer router. I have found that many routers will crash when they have lots of traffic. This happens in a small office with…

OK, I admit it, after all the harping on backing things up, there is one that I didn’t do. We had a website that was built with a github private repo. Then, we got rid of the site, so I blew away the virtual machine running ghost on Digital Ocean. Then we ran out of…

OK, so here are the version bumps for the products I’m using now: DxO OpticsPro Version 11. This bucks the trend where everyone uses Lightroom, but maybe I’m just  a contrarian and like to support small French developers. This is the first step for me and it does automatic distortion and vignette correction. The new…

Android to Mac is pretty mysterious, it doesn’t show up in Mac Photos (of course) nor does it show up as a USB device so you need to: Download Android File Transfer When you plug your Marshmallow phone in, it should pop up the USB transfer select dialog and you pick File Transfer to get…

Well with zika running rampant, Consumer Reports published their list of the best repellants. The best appears to be: 20% picaridin used in Sawyer Picaridin good ol’30% Deet in the Ben’s 30%. (I still have some 100% deet in a bag somewhere, imagine how powerful that is) a close second. Finally there is Repel Lemon…

Well, working with the RPi has been great. The community has been terrific and Raspbian has worked well. Now we are off to try some different platforms mainly to get a more standard graphics core, so looking at the Pine64. This has just shipped and uses the Mali GPU from ARM. Man is this a…

We use Google Slides for casual slide creation and it is pretty good. But what if you want you get a sealed PDF that used to be PowerPoint and and you want to edit it. What’s a person to do. Well it isn’t easy to find, but basically the steps are: Install Google Chrome. This…

In the last seven days, I’ve had two parents ask me what they should do about a teenage girl who wants to program and is general a STEM person. Well there are lots of resources, but programming is a bit of a strange beast. Yes you can sit in a class and learn, but programming…

A friend mentioned that they had a fried laptop because of spillage. Well, the easiest way to deal with this is to get a Keyboard protector. You have to find one that fits your laptop, but they are pretty cheap. $8 for the ASUS one for instance. Pretty cheap insurance