Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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

Well the kids swear by their Ronstan sailing watches. They are actually made by Optimum Time in the UK, but they are reliable and ubiquitous, but there are definitely other options: Aquastar Match Race 9010 ($120). It is Swiss and has a cool collection of dots at the top for the countdown. Gill Regatta Master…

Well we ripped out our electrostatic air filters which needed cleaning every three months and put in paper filters. I feel bad about using more paper, but they just plane work better. So I guess I take the recommendation. These filters are really confusing to buy but there are basically two parameters: Size. There is…

Welcome back to the real world, so you need to change your password right now for but you can check haveibeenpwned.com LinkedIn. They had a massive hack of a 25% of all their passwords. Back in 2012, but they are now on sale now. Tumbler. Same thing back in 2013 but they didn’t tell us until…

Such a strange product! If u say to upgrade your Notes app then the upgrade button never appears again unless u to to settings/iCloud/notes and click and unclick it.  The new file format doesn’t work with old iPads and old versions of MacOS so just use on newer machines. Finally store it on iCloud so…

I’ve been confused for a while about the Whispbar. We have these for our older Honda Fit and they are truly impressive. Quiet and they do not reduce gas mileage either unlike the older Thule square bars I’ve used before. But I didn’t realize that whispbar.com is actually a company acquired in 2010 by Yakima as a premium…

I haven’t bought a bike in literally a decade, but it is fun to get back into it particularly for a new rider. It may be sad or good, but not a lot has changed in biking in the last few years. The big changes are the move to electronic shifting and at the lower…

Well the monitor world is actually moving pretty quickly these days with the transition to 4K monitors well in swing and prices dropping, here are recommendations from Tom’s Hardware for good, better and best in the office. The biggest caveat is that you have to get a mini-Displayport to Displayport connector to see 4K at…

Well I’ve been using git for (three?) years now and this last week I made three horrible mistakes by accidentally pushing to master and also merging when I didn’t mean to. This happens much more often when I use multiple machines at home and at work. So here’s to better git hygiene for all: All…

Well when you get beyond AAA batteries (I think the Chinese and Japanese systems are a little simple D is type 1, C is type2,.. You enter the world of strange numbers and letters. Here’s decoder ring for just one type R44. As an aside, the code is the type of battery is the first letter,…

Well we’ve been using Docker quite a bit in production and it has been a learning experience for sure. A good one in that you start with a simple Dockerfile which looks a lot like a shell script and then realize how powerful the ideas are. The main confusion is this separation between what should…

As Duncan says, I don’t get out much 🙂 so here is another post in that series. In this case getting Docker to run on Raspberry Pis with the latest Hypriot releases. The guys over there are doing amazing work getting this to work and are right now on their 0.5 release. There isn’t any…