Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Seems like there is some sort of strange bug in the USB driver on MacOS Sierra and Vuescan. I’ve been having trouble with hangs for a while and this seems to have gotten worse with Sierra, although El Capitan had the same issues. The calibrate for this 35mm image scanner takes forever. Sigh. Old hardware…

Well with my troubles with Bluehost, time once again to see who the best hosting partner is. Now that Bluehost is owned by a mega-corporation, I wonder what else is out there. A quick test at webhostinghero.com does show the speed issues with this site. Bluehost has been pretty decent to me, it’s about $12/month…

I spent a couple of days tearing my hair out. Word to the wise, if you are on bluehost and hit the Spam Experts trial (which I gather I did at some point). What happens is that when the trial ends, it silently queues all your mail into the spam experts and no mail at…

(A small refuge from all the political news), here are the latest recommendations: 9V Batteries. if you use them in smoke detectors, etc., then you want one with lots of charge. But Powerstream.com recommends the Energizer Industrial has 450 mAH or the Rayovac Industrial Plus. They have nearly 50% more charge of a Duracell Coppertop. SATA SSDs…

Well figuring out how to get useful data from your car is definitely an obscure art. Here are some notes for noobs: There is a standard connector for all cars after 1996 which is called OBD. (Onboard Diagnostics), you have you to google your car to figure out where the port is. But it is…

OK, there are a couple of ways to save some money: Cashback Monitor will tell you click through sites with discounts. Right now Top Cashback is offering an 8% discount if you click through to the App store on a Mac. pretty good. Once you click through, you should if you’ve been thinking ahead, you…

Two quick notes. Since upgrading to MacOS Sierra, I’ve found that DxO in both its version 10 and version 11 is a little strange so some quick notes: The main window seems to get stuck in a highly vertical view. You have to click between the crop and move buttons and then drag the zoom…

Well I guess if you’ve built 20 machines by hand, it is inevitable you are going to get hardware problems and boot problems. Here are some and what to do to solve them: Ubuntu 14.04 gets stuck in a logon loop. I’ve had this problem twice now. You reboot your machine and then at the…

I’ ve been hitting quite a few these days, here are two annoying one: iPhone Upgrade Program. The actual loan you take from Citizen’s is managed by a site called fdec.com. Just be aware that this site does not work on either Safari where you get a blank page when trying to login or on…

Wow it is incredible what Chase is doing with rewards cards. Hey Paul if you are listening here is the ideal portfolio. It does seem like the devaluations of airlines has meant cards are where the action is :  1. Chase Sapphire Reserve. Effectively $150 per year ($450 plus $300 for any travel expense). 100K…

This is an awesome card, but you have to dig down deep to activate benefits. It is buried deep in Redeem Points on the portal. Go to ultimaterewards.chase.com and do: First if you have other Chase cards, transfer all those points to the Sapphire Reserve so you can use them with the Chase Travel portal…

Well, now that 4K ultra high definition televisions costs as much as a bag of chips. (OK maybe not that little, but they are really inexpensive), the next jump in state of the art of high definition. That means a much higher color range than before so models like the new Samsung UN65KS9800 provide the latest bells…

OK, I finally had a sous vide meal with my buddy Paul, I can see why geeks all over the world buy these things, some notes: Buy a sous vide controller. The Anova immersion controller is less than $200, but the big boys get either a $1,000 Fusion Pro immersion controller or a dedicated water…

Ok shooting a bunch of candids and here are some quick reminders for best settings: Canon 5D Mark II. I know it’s old but trusty. Base ISO is 100 and you want to start below ISO 800 before dynamic ranges disappears For lenses Canon 70-200/f2.8 L. This is not the mark II but still a…

This is one of the more tricky things to find, but if you are running Marshmellow, here are the instructions that seem to work. With Android, you do not get a hard drive that appears on your screen, nor does Photos work with Android, so try this instead: Plug in your Nexus 5X into your…

This is actually harder than you think. Make sure to leave more than plenty of time as you have to get your way across the city.  Uber. I tried twice but uber drivers in NJ will refuse to take you to JFK. They mumble something about licensing. Probably more likely they don’t want to be…

Ok the many mysteries of travel. Here’s a big one. What’s the best way back from the airport assuming ur tired don’t want to spend too much but want to get of the airport as fast as possible. From best to worst Driving there and back. Ok still the most reliable for dropoff and assuming…

I’ve been using Karabiner to remap a PC keyboard to a Mac keyboard. This however only works for El Capitan and earlier. You need to use Karabiner-Elements for Sierra MacOS. By default, this switch the function keys to the brightness and other keys. You can also edit a ~/.karabiner.d/configuration/karabiner.json

Some notes on how this should work: At least with a Mac, the bleeding edge releases of flux software does not work, but the stable release does. The scanner heads keep popping up, you have to contact them and get better brackets.

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…