Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

I’ve had one friend with mold everywhere on her waterpik. They don’t talk about it enough, but when I opened up the bottom of the pik, I did see green mold. And also in the area above and around. The recommendation is to use vinegar, but bleach seems much stronger. Also eventually the interior of…

I had always thought that this was pretty much a lost cause. I have quite a few corrupted JPEG files. I had a bad RAID array and it wiped out a bunch of files. Now with scrubbing and more reliable drives, I hope this doesn’t happen anymore, but it looks like there are some programs…

Thank goodness for Reddit, I’ve been using Handbrake to get DVDs that folks make (yes there are still some who are doing this, I don’t know why) and ripping them into mp4. This now seems to hang on El Capitan. I do not know who is still ripping copy protected DVDS, but here’s the tip.…

I must have done this a million times, but each time I have to painfully go through the steps again and they do seem to change. Here are the points that seem to work today for El Capitan and Ubuntu 14.04.4. There is an alternative setup that doesn’t use rEFInd and just hacks around with…

Read about oculus rift notes on poor graphics support on Mac. And then discovered it’s actually reasonably easy to run Mac OS X on intel hardware thanks to Tony.  I’m not quite sure why I would need it but what the heck some folks want it for cost I would guess. 

OK way too many nerd thoughts today: 16-bit vs 8-bit color and 5400 vs 2700 dpi resolution scanning. I’m scanning lots of old photos. Until now I’ve been using JPEG because they are small, but the lack of 16-bit color has really bothered me. Even snapshots with crappy cameras show light and dark issues with…

Ok last century, the last time I used UNIX, the best we could do was uucp and NFS was the future. Now XXX years later I’m trying to get a file server running and come to find out that the best Ubuntu seems to offer is Samba and well NFS! So I guess something is…

A good piece. You can buy a big invertor . Plug it into your battery and get 1500 watts from it!

Well it certainly isn’t easy to upgrade one. But here are your options: The Mac Pro six core uses the Xeon E3-1650 Westmere running at 3.5ghz. So it is a very decent processor Unfortunately by default it ships with all memory slots full 4x4GB but at least they are using unbuffered ECC RAM DDR-1866. So…

Well I’m sure happy to have gotten rid of the $20/month charge for the rented Comcast router. We had it for a while because we had all this trouble with comcast, but thanks to the right email to the right person, they did a great job fixing it. Now onto making things work better. It…

I never thought I would see the day when 1gb Ethernet would be slow. But moving around 160GB training data sets isn’t fun. So looks like it’s time to look at 1000baseT networking. Also we have quite a few Poe devices now and our old linksys sge2000 literally started crashing so time for a new…

I’ve always used core i5 k processors for my builds. With most gaming an overclocked core i5 at 4.5ghz for $220 is all you need. And the other features don’t matter.  The lone exception is a cheap Xeon file server where based on vlads advice we went with a six core slow Xeon for ecc…

Well this is supposed to be the most powerful setup box made, but argh, is it hard to setup.  It requires that you logon to Google and it is really pleasant, asks you to use your phone or your laptop. Here is what I found: The http://g.co/AndroidTV is not compatible with either iPhone or Safari.…

I think I’m a little scared I have over the years I’ve accumulated all this gear and it is the same as the wirecutters recomendations  Lowepro 350 aw. Nearly the perfect stealth bag for camera equipment. I’m on my third one. Great protection and even carries a 15 laptop. The latest is all weather with…

Ok so now that we are getting to just internet here are the tips tricks and traps Wow Comcast customer service has really improved. Actual smiling people. And retail locations that’s great. The main optimizations are getting rid of television. If you love sports this is hard but otherwise it is quite survivable. You can…

So how to make it all work. Rather than wait for my new hardware, I thought I might as well start with the hundred or so Raspberry Pi Model Bs we already have. Here’s a recipe for how to get it all running: Hypriot: The Operating system Hypriot are a great bunch and they have…

Wow what a great day for low cost processors. The conversion to 64 bit is on and that means much simpler software development. We are moving away from the strange hybrid architecture of the original Raspberry Pi (ARMv6 with hardware floating point) to 64-bit and fast GPUs. Also the busses are getting better so some…

OK more than a day, but there was a bad update where Apple accidentally blacklisted their own driver (ugh, I’m sure someone is getting yelled at right now). It should be fixed automatically if you are using the automatic update feature. Mine was broken at on Friday and fixed Saturday at 530PM, so software update…

Well, we got a pretty amazing server two years ago and it is interesting to see how little has changed, most of the parts are still good (Haswell-E), but the main thing that has changed are: SSDs in Server NVMe. Wow boot drives and cache drives are much faster. With a Xeon platform there are…

Wow the service run by Obitalk is pretty incredible. It has some incredible features using Google Voice and it works with a burglar alarm as well. It also has no FCC fees as well and you can hear your voice mail on Google Voice. Of course who knows how secure any of this is really…

Time once again for my monthly security reminders here is what I learned (relearned): iMessage. This is actually quite a safe protocol. It is zero knowledge in that Apple cannot read the messages while in transit. Way better than sending a text or email both are unencrypted. The main vulnerabilities are that Apple can be…

Lots in the news about cracking iPhones. Here’s some net net advice Let us all hope that iOS 10 not only signs updates with their key but also encrypts with the user passcode.  For the current iPhone the easy thing to do is to use TouchID and then bump up the passcode from 4 digits…

Wow what a difference two years make. We are now in free fall for tvs and HDR is coming as well. There is also a convergence happening as tvs get full operating systems and arm chips So here is a quick review of what to get depending on needs. Hat tip to the wirecutter Computer…

Never had so much fun learning about a new topic or building a computer but at last I have a reason to want a $5k desktop! arriving in two days! Of course since then it’s pretty clear that instead of the i7 we should Xeon e5-1650 v3. It’s the same chip and costs the same…

Most of notes now go to slack. It’s so convenient to post there as I do most things in my phablet these days. 

Wow this is a cool application. it uses a web browser on the Mac and then you use a QR code to connect it to an Android device. This gives the local IP address of the Mac to the phone and somehow the browser application can facilitate the transfer

Living With the iPad Pro – Extratextuals https://apple.news/AJOMlfeCiMaGVF0hmAVERtw has great app list for productivity on iOS. 

Well finally back to running a Raspberry Pi stack. Got the new Hypriot Cluster Lab which is in it’s first incarnation. it is much easier than the manual docker swarm setup up, but a little less clear how to do thing. It uses Consul for managing the cluster (rather than just using docker swarm cli)…

Well there are so many options these days but here are some good ones: directpay.irs.gov. This is a free site that let’s you pay with your checking account for free. The only trick is that you have to do it before the deadline. You need 3-5 days beforehand. pay1040.com. This has a $3 charge for…

OK, this might seem like an oxymoron, but if you are doing machine learning you kind of want to do it when mobile or in poor connectivity areas yet also want something that doesn’t weight 7 pounds. I tried the MSI gaming notebook, but at 17 inches and 6 pounds it is just too big.…