Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Ok, I realize that I should just be incredulous that a 7 year old piece of hardware actually still works, but it actually does. Actually every device with a HDD has now failed. It is the worst part of computers and Apple buries them inside the Mac Mini and iMacs, so almost impossible to fix.…

We’ve been using with great success the 40″ Philips BDM4064UC monitor. It is 4K and it is terrific for writing software. You can have a huge number of terminals open which is just great. The price is quite high. About $800 and now about $700. The other thing that is great about that monitor is…

There is not much posted about how to actually get a high performance yet cool 4-way machine to work. I’m working on this build at Pc Parts Picker. It is definitely a niche product but here are the goals: Reliability. If you are running two week ML jobs, you do not want the thing to…

The area of pci express has always been incredibly confusing to me. And there isn’t much written about it for laymen. But an old anandtech piece finally made is clear what is happening. Modern intel processors are directly connected to memory and to peripherals. The smaller processors have 28 serial lanes and Xeon has 40. These…

Ok so maybe I’m not a genius but felt pretty accomplished doing an incredibly nerdy thing. Getting four Ethernet ports on a supermicro server board running Ubuntu  to work bonded together over a Cisco sg200-50p switch.  What’s going on is a little complicated but here’s the quick summary Most devices have 1Gbps Ethernet. So the…

I had a great conversation with a long lost buddy and it reminded me of passion and wanting to follow it. It reminded me some of the things that are really important to me: True friends and family. As one fellow put it. Not acquaintances or “business” friends but people who would actually lay down…

So some quick notes on cool ideas: Docker-machine is only designed to work on a single client. So if you want multiple users or you have a home and work machine it is actually very hard to get the configuration right. There is a magic configuration json that does this but it uses hard coded…

I’ve been using (gasp!) google slides for a while now and it is pretty decent. But now I need to do a simple mockup of a web site to put into the deck. As usually, the list of tools is incredibly long, but starting from creativebloq.com I’m working through the free ones that are right…

TL;dr For web demos, use docker and docker-compose to bring up your entire system on your local Macbook. For hardware demos, use a big beefy wireless router and your phone as a hotspot to blow through and create your own network. Web Demos These days basically everyone has to do demos on the road. Some…

Well after you read the tutorial on docker, you find that there are least 1M ways that people build docker images. In trolling through the docker.com and github.com, here are the best practices: Believe in micro services. If you are putting more than one major function into a container, you probably want two of them.…

Ok there is a place that is actually beyond the bleeding edge and I guess I’m right there. Fortunately there are amazing folks like Luxas, Rhess and the folks at Hypriot that are right there with me, but here is what I’ve learned about docker and its internals and how it handles clustering. But TL;dr…

Wow getting back to copying CDs and FLACs. I had completely forgotten which tools to use. Well a quick Google let to a Reddit thread and a cool tool XLD which does what you want. Does FLAC decoding and encoding. Also handles file naming properly. Awesome!

Well if you somehow can’t afford the $128K Pascal server that nVidia just announced (I can’t imagine why), what should someone do if they want to do some machine learning? Well, unfortunately, there are no cheap good alternatives right now as we are in the middle of the Maxwell to Pascal transition with nVidia and…

It is a good idea to monitor your credit scores and it used to cost a fortune to do it. Fortunately if you have a Discover card or have a Bank of America account, you can do this for free. So good luck!

Well if you have a corrupted JPEG, how do you get it back? http://thelawlers.com/Blognosticator/?p=795 points out that Adobe Photoshop has a built in recovery application. So if you have something that doesn’t open in Mac Preview, try to load it in Adobe Photoshop. I tried this and although the image as distorted (it was shifted…

OK, with the new M.2 SSDs and also lots of SSDs, you do need to be careful when building machines. Here are some notes: The new M.2 slots on motherboards share PCI Express slots with SATA. So when you install your SSDs, make sure you do not use the SATAs that are dedicated to the…

It is incredible what folks charge for things that should be free. They seem to rely on people forgetting what is going on and automatic charging. My buddy Holden had a web site package for $140 a year that was essentially just forwarding email. If you have the same problem here is how to get…

Well trying to get the Raspberry Pi back up and running and so many good things have happened in the last three years. Here’s the quickest way: Install latest hypriot from https://blog.hypriot.com/downloads. The latest is 0.7. The main thing I’m not sure of is how to update the latest version of hypriot. This version has…

I’ve been busy recovering lots of camera work. The latest is getting the Xiaoyi cameras working again. Some quick notes: Tawbaware.com. It has a 12Mp Sony sensor and a Ambarella A7 processor just like the GoPro Hero 4. You can actually changed the fixed focus by rotating the ring. It is set to be in…