Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Wow sometimes I wonder about VMware. If u install Mac OS X capitan with fusion 8 then suddenly copy and paste and hgfs (the ability to see mac file system from VMware breaks without any symptoms.  Thanks to sam who ferreted it out here is what is going on: VMware switched from their proprietary VMware…

What to do for the guy who has everything? Order them some incredible foods over the internet of course. We are big farm-to-table types and love local stories, so collectiong from gear patrol, esquire and other fork & steve, here are some recommendations: La Frieda. In Bergen County, they had a show on HGTV, kind…

Was just talking to a new grad and realized this credit card and credit score thing is filled with disinformation and confusing… So if you are new to credit here are the three things to do to maximize your credit score Get free credit cards as soon as possible. I’d recommend in this order. Discover…

Wow, it used to be basically impossible to get more than the typical credit card discount (1 point or about 2 cents per mile), but now here are some nice offers because credit cards are getting competitive, in order, if you use Amazon: Amazon Prime Store Card. This gives you 5% off of Amazon.com if…

Well the biggest problem are lots of passwords and the solution are password managers but what if password managers get hacked or have vulnerabilities? Or are closed source? Sadly both the managers I’ve used have both.  Lastpass. I switched away last year because their site was compromised and more importantly they have your key so…

This is actually a really fun feature on the iPhone 6s Plus. you can see a mini movie next to each still. There are a few tricks: While you can export these out to the real world, you get a JPG and a MOV file and these do not import well back into the Mac…

Well I have a bunch of big panoramas and I normally use Hugin to process them. But it seems to have trouble on El Capitan and also apparently you know need to install a separate tool called autopano-sift-c to get control points to work properly but this didn’t seem to really help. I do find…

I wrote a script on this but of course I forgot how it all works. The brief summary is that there is a new encryption scheme that is supposed to be better than RSA called elliptical encryption using a curve handily named ED25519. It needs at least OpenSSL 5.7 or 6.5. The other great thing…

Well the phone wars don’t seem to be ending soon. We have 10GB+1GB for $80 and now this is down to 12GB for $80 in the new Verizon Plan, so what’s not to lose. The big change is that they are debundling purchase, so the access charge is down to $20/month but you have to…

Well bluehost used to be so inexpensive, but like all service, they gradually ratchet the price. Domain registration used to be $5 then $8 and now $15 for basically doing nothing. I’ve been meaning to look at alternatives and namecheap.com seems like a decent choice. They have a lost cost privacy guard as well. So…

I have to say that sometimes I like the “small” release without lots of issues. El Capitan is one of them. Only problem I’ve seen so far is that Private Internet Access needs an update.  But the new Side by side is pretty cool as are some of the gestures that are copied from IOS.…