Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Here are the big ones as covered in a survey article: Tensorflow. The newest one from Google. The biggest issue seems to be how this scales as Tensorflow is a single machine solution now. Google Brain is the a closed source scaled system. Torch. A great chance to learn lua and Facebook has open sourced…

For a long time I used pricegrabber.com, but then it really changed to a resell site. Then I used the Merrill Lynch rewards site which was decent, but had some great mileage bonuses, now I’ve just been hacking away looking at some random store (Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Wal*mart, Newegg, Rakuten and Overstock) and that…

I haven’t seen much about this on the web, but with our two older machines (MacBook Pro 2010 and iMac 2009), we have had hang problems with File Vault. On the former, the upgrade just failed and hung at a blank screen. The on the later, it worked, but then on some update, it would…

We just started our first Skylake build on micro-ATX taking the Haswell build and using it with a system cost of $1500. The main changes with the Z170 board called the Gigabyte Z170MX-Gaming 5 is that we now get: USB 3.1 Controller. So 16Gbps for 2 USB 3.1 ports (10Gbps is standard and is 2x…

Happy 2016. I can’t believe we are already here. Wow, and we are getting close to 2020 and driverless cars and even hoverboards, but the old tradition of New Years resolutions lives on. So here are mine: Really understand computer vision machine learning. Ok nerdy in the extreme, but last year, it was about really…

Ok been reading way too much about AI lately and helping folks do everything from buy a computer to getting a summer job. Some meta rules. And then some rules. Metarules Ok here are some tips. First meta rules (an ode to Zombieland): Have someone who has done it before. Doesn’t matter if they know…

Well we’ve use the Ubiquiti Unifi’s for the last few year and have had good luck with them but now the product line is huge a little confusing, so in order from most capable and expensive to least. It is tough because all the names sound the same with all the data sheets: Unifi AP…

Well I know that it isn’t practical, but wow, the new MacBook is kind of amazing. For $1300 you get a 256GB flash system with 8GB of memory and it is completely fanless. Most importantly it has a nice keyboard and reasonable 7 hour battery life. The main issues are: it is mid product life…

It’s always hard to know the best time to buy things. But for electronics the main question is how rapidly the technology is evolving.  For things that are moving fast it makes the most sense to try to buy “ahead” because the software typically will end up depending on new features. For instance phones are…

Ok I’ve been trying to be good and use the bus and run to work. One strangeness with the Orcacard. If u get down to zero balance and have autologous enabled you can actually get on the bus. Auto load only triggers if u get to zero and the refills.  It also doesn’t show any…

Wow what a confusing set of ideas. With these modern graphical operating systems, making character or terminal applications look nice takes you back literally 40 years.  Here’s the scoop for pretty terminal colors for developers.  The default colors in vim are pretty bad. http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized has devoted way too much time to creating a beautiful palette…

There doesn’t look like any way to create a bootable Mac Linux USB Drive from Mac OS X right now. Unetbootin, USB Linux (only works for Mac boot themselves) all fail. Rufus on Windows works and hopefully Ubuntu Disk Creator.

Ok, so if you are a real nerd, here is how to make all this work. It maybe the Holiday season but Ebay seems pretty broken. Right now I can’t buy either staples or Best Buy gift cards. Goes into cart but on checkout says unknown failure. I wish they would just say they have…

Ok this has got to be the most underrated carrier. Their pricing is pretty amazing at $20 per user. $10 for data but no minimum. If u don’t use data they tefund you the $10 or any part of it. Most people like me end up 20% under because overage sucks so that can save…

So you want to give gift cards, well here are some ways to stack bonuses and get some big savings according to Frequent Miler. This isn’t manufactured spend but legitimate use. The biggest problem is that the Ebay site is just very broken. For two days the Paypal connection didn’t work. And then the Paypal…

Well this has been an incredible time for monitors. Basically after a long multi year period, it is getting interesting again. There are two pieces of news and some new recommendations from 4k.com and tomshardware.com 4K monitors These are now affordable and wow, if you are doing spreadsheets, writing software or the next great American…

Well, I thought we were set for computes, but turns out that we do need to get two more. Just missed the Black Friday sales, but I don’t think these components are going on sale. Still, this is an incredible machine mainly because of the new SSD that is going in. Really fast and it…

I’ve spend the last six months getting deeply into programming again and over and over I find that I learn differently than the way most tutorials take you. So here’s a quick list of new things I’ve learned and the fundamental idea that (at least of me cracked the nut) where there are usual one…

Wow, it took me a long time to find these bugs, but I’ve been working on various bash scripts and I finally figure something out that is hard to know: There are a bunch of of bash safety checks that you can turn on. Most see great, but there are real gotchas. Here are two…

OK, here are some quick notes about things you should do to get a basic level of privacy: Signal. This is a smart phone application that let’s you encrypt your calls and text messages. Its on IOS and Android and super easy. If you are a geek, then you can also try ChatSecure, the same…

Well if you missed the notification, there is something called COPPA where Amazon has to certify it doesn’t advertise to sites that market to kids under 13. If you didn’t fill out the form by October 31, they close your affiliate account and invalidate all your tags. How nice legal things are.   Oh well,…

Well these last three days feels like a hard slog. Here are some of the tips for Linux geek, so hopefully you can avoid problems when you are just trying to get a regular job that will pull from a git repo and run an automated build. There are many systems available to do this,…

Ok, for the truly nerdy, if you just want to change your pass phrase on a ssh key, here is how to do it:   ssh-keygen -p -f _your private key file_   When you are doing this, you have a chance with the switch from an MD5 (not very safe) to a bcrypt with…

Well, a Honda Fit is an incredibly practical car. You can buy expensive accessories, but the after market is terrific: Floor mats. Rather than the factory ones, from Auto Anything, you can get custom fit nearly impervious ones for $99 less 6% off in a cilck through rebate and Retailmenot has a 15% off coupon.…

Uh, why did they do this, you cannot run Unifi.app in /Applications, it needs a writeable directory. So it needs to live in a writeable place like /Applications/Unifi/Unifi.app and make /Applications/Unifi writeable, but this didn’t seem to help. What did was to delete and reinstall and then it seemed to work after a reboot. I don’t know…

Wow, I don’t know why Amazon doesn’t advertise these things more, but I’m kind of stunned at the things you can get if you are Prime member now. You should sign up! In order. Well it isn’t 42, but it sure feels like it: Of course the obvious one is free two day shipping. Free…

Gosh what a pain, last year we were building very fast Haswell systems in micro-ITX. We could get two dual slot graphics cards in there and it sounded like a freight train, but could get overclocking to 4.5GHz or so with the Noctua NH-12L which is low profile with great clearance underneath. One fascinating thing…

Google Apps makes this super hard mainly because: Google randomly changes their user interface, so you cannot find anything that is up to date Google has both Google Groups and Google Business Groups which are completely different do not work the same way. This is for the base Google Groups. Email aliases are actually handles…

Docker itself is pretty cool, but when you add remote control of multiple machines it gets really powerful. You can essentially use docker-machine to control remote cloud instances or to control virtual machines that are running locally. There is also a powerful idea called generic which means you can start docker container on any linux…

Oh if this were easy. As explained, this is at first easy, just increase the virtual disk space. In fact with today’s large machine and the fact this is all virtual, literally going from 20GB default to 200GB seems a no brainer for most developers: Expand from VMware Fusion the Disk to some big number…