Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Man, those guys are smart. They now charge $10 a month for a modem and an additional $10/month for a wifi access point built in. So what’s a person to do. Well, just buy your own modem and then hook it up and you get rid fo the charge. Comcastapprovedmodems.com has a list and the…

Not to say that Synology doesn’t do a great job (heck I have two of them), but sometimes it is nice to know how to roll your own. Anandtech explains how using a low cost Baytrail chip (vs an expensive Xeon), the right motherboard and the right chassis

Well the cost of these accessories has really collapsed, but here are the must haves: Tempered Glass screen protector. The glass is so strong now I don’t know if you really need one, but it for just $7 from Tensdar, you can get a tempered glass protector and never worry about it. We usually get…

Man this is way more complicated than it should be, but to summarize if you want to edit your google documents offline here is what you have to do from PCMag.com Use Google Chrome Make sure the Google Docs offline extension is loaded If you have multiple google account (eg home and work), then you…

Well digilloyd and mingthein are both saying it, with the improvements in Sony, it looks like a goto place for the pros. The A7Rii looks like the ideal landscape high resolution system and Zeiss lenses, but then the question is what is the long term path to make sure your lenses last a lifetime even…

I had not realized how many fixes were in there…but thanks to Tom’s Hardware that is clear: Six digit PIN. You should move to that or use Touch ID Two factor authentication. You need to have another device to login to El Capitan or iOS 9. Although a pain, it is very secure. LibreSSL vs…

I was wondering when this would happen. We have had great success with using an aquarium chiller in a mineral-oil cooled PC. Keeps the temperature down to 70C from 80C for just oil bath or 90C for air cooled even with the best cooler made (Noctua DH-14).  Sso phonoroic Hex 1.0 is a “mild” cooler…

It was kind of fun to do a series on what my life has been like in different things I’ve used… My life in languages: Shanghainese, Mandarin, English, French, Russian, PDP-8 Toggling, Basica, Mac-80 Assembler, C, Pascal, Mandarin (again!), RPL, C++, 1-2-3 Macros, Excel, HTML, PHP, Mandarin (again!!), Bash, Python, Javascript,… My life in keyboards:…

OK, maybe it is just a philosophy, but I do think that everything you need to learn is already in a book somewhere. After all with 7 billion or so people alive and billions who have written books literally, the only problem is finding the right one, so here’s my list of books that I…

No one is getting any younger, but Calvin mentioned in a a very cool webrtc conference call (appear.io is incredible) that his grandfather worked on information theory. It is one of those things lost in time, but 60 years ago was an incredible time for the basis of information theory. From Shannon to McCluskey, the…

Well, in the last two years, I’ve been way to glib about things. So now is the time to straighten up. There seems to be no really good guide about how to do this, but the steps are basically: Secure your passwords The advice here is good but it takes a long time to make…

We’ve been using mythtv for a while, but now it has a corrupted mariadb so nothing records. We have to start all over and the instructions are clear about getting rid of the software but not the man configuration and database files thanks to Mac Ports, this is much easier.   Note that the second…

OK, more stuff that no one cares about. About two years ago, we got a Razor keyboard. It cost more than many computers do ($140), but it had the famous Cherry Blue switches. These reminded me of the original IBM PC. Click and clack, but boy did they feel sure and sharp. Now we just…

I was stupid and installed Ubuntu on top of a Windows 7 and Windows 8 dual boot configuration. The result was that Ubuntu was fine, but those systems were lost. Googling, I found I could create a USB boot from an ISO with Rufus from a running Windows system. The other ways didn’t work. It…

Well it has been a busy two weeks of hacking away. Two main things have been struggling with understanding how Scons (a kind of super make works) by wrestling with it controlling the installs of a Cmake, Bjam and Node-gyp and npm installed programs. This stuff is not easy particularly when you get 300,000 lines…

I should not have enter so fast, I wanted to install Ubuntu next to Windows 7, but by default it wipes out the boot sector of the main drive. Argh. Now I can’t get to Windows (for all those wonderful games?!), so what to do? I don’t know if this advice from ubuntuforums will work,…

I read somewhere that Apple doesn’t say it, but they do design their machines to last ten years. That’s pretty incredible in an age where a phone is obsolete in two years. I have to say that it does feel like it is true. I’m typing this right now on a MacBook Pro 2010 using…

Well, in using 1Password on Linux, if you try to just double click on the .agilekeychain with Firefox or Chrome, it will fail because for security reasons, you can no longer access local files from a browser. To make it work, if you are internet connected, login to the www.dropbox.com site and click on the…

Well, I don’t know what is up with the thing, but it is eerie when you have *exactly the same problem as someone else! See http://forum.dji.com/thread-18942-2-1.html I’ve formatted the sd.. then put the 1.3 update on it. I put the sd in the P3 and left it on for about 40 minutes. The light on the…

OK, this is the strangest product in some ways on the simple things. It is so tightly integrated with github, but it isn’t clear how to use it. Logging into another account it isn’t clear how to logout of it and sign it with another github account. You actually have to do this by going…

Well what are the cool tools we’ve been using lately: Slack. Wow I see why they got a billion dollar valuation. Slack is already a verb in our shop and I barely read email anymore. It is much more public than email and has some really convenient features for developers: a) you can edit your…

We have some really old Linksys switches, but they still work, so trying to get them up from 2007 software. Here are the steps: The switches ship with firmware 1.0.0.45, to get them to the new graphical interface called version 3.0.0.17, you have to use the Easy Upgrade utility that only runs on Windows. In…

Trying out different firewall specific builds. One small gotcha. If you are trying pfsense, then you download the memstick version if you want to make a usb stick and you need to use dd to create a 16k sector size system   gzcat pfsense-memstick.img | dd of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=16k But if you are using VMWare Fusion…

Seems like i have to do this every six months. Well here’s the latest update on how to do it: howtogeek.com has a new graphical method rather than the command line approach of Ubuntu. It uses an open source tool cleverly named Mac Linux USB Loader. It even downloads a distribution for you and then installs…

You know there are some moments when you really achieve something incredible. Not something that is good. Like seeing your brother or going to the hospital for a friend but which is truly amazing and unique? Well this shot to me symbolizes that. After thousand of photos and thousands of dollars, I really learned something.…

There are so many out there that I just limited myself to analyzing those that are small enough and made of metal so they can fit on your key ring: Kingston SE9 G2. I’ve been using these for quite a while and unfortunately for USB 3.0 they aren’t super fast at 30MBps read and 10MBps…

Ok, now that I’ve worked on Python debugging (Sublime in Vintage mode, Anaconda, Logging, winpdb in a loop), although given my personal keyboard speed, using vi a lot because winpdb errors are not as clear as just the python interactive errors. Then there is the Javascript thing I need to learn and here’s what I’ve learned about debugging:…

Argh this has been so frustrating. If you run VMWare Fusion full screen on a Mac, and hit the wrong magic key, then your cursor is captured and the help is invisible in the title bar, the magic is Command+Ctrl to get you out of it.

We are just at the eve of the next turn of the crank with Skylake nearly here and the arrival of: DDR4 memory. So higher speeds are coming. NVMe SSDs. These are also arriving and are showing 2x the performance of SATA (1.2GBps) up to 4x PCI Express (2.4GBps). 4K Monitors. Even at 60 frames…

Ugh monopolies are horrible. No choice for any broadband and yet despite paying them $$&s for years, we have service just collapse in the last year. Had five truck rolls and technicians all report the same thing good signal at the street and terrible signal by The time it gets to the house.  Even had…