Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, here are the tips, tricks and traps so far… IMAP Migration is a little complicated. You can do this as an administrator but need the user to give you type their password in. It is setup in the administration windows Google Sheets don’t work well in Safari. Seems to work fine in Chrome, but…

I haven’t spent much time optimizing car rentals and rewards because they haven’t seemed that interesting. But now Hertz and United are doing triple points so it is good to understand. In the old world, 75 United points weren’t super interesting (at 1.8 cents/point). But the latest promotion is 1,250 points per rental plus 50…

Well week 3 of intensive Mac Excel hacking, so learning lots of new handy shortcuts. The mouse is slow when you are doing a lot of Exceling: CMD-T Paste Format CMD-V Paste Value CMD-F Paste Formula FN-F9 Evaluate the highlighted part of a formula (great for debugging)   Then for formatting: CTRL-I Insert rows CTRL-(dash)…

OK, I’ve been battling this for a while and haven’t seen many posts on it, but here is what has happened and the best explanation seems to be a combination of iCloud sharing issues and this new “automatically maintain settings” in Apple Mail Mail interacts strangely with iCloud Keychain and Internet Accounts. Zombie accounts I’ve…

Well, figured this out for SMTP, but what about IMAP? Well it’s a little simpler, basically there is port 143 for unencrypted and port 993 for encrypted. You really always want to encrypt, so 993 works best. Most modern servers handle encryption on 143 as well.

I have almost forgotten how to use Ghost. It was a great experiment in building something with node.js on digital ocean and figuring nginx. Kind of proud it all actually works. Now its time to do some site validation and I need to be able to put a static page up there. This is a…

OK, nearly there with Google Apps, but now I get to learn about SMTP which I’ve never really groked: We are trying to migrate a single user and have everyone elses mail forwarded to the legacy mail server. When I turned this on, some of the mail seemed to get through, but the forwards didn’t…

OK, now that we are getting through the SUMIFS nightmare, there are two things to know: SUMIFS are good when they work and COUNTIFS give you some debugging. The main problem is that there isn’t any way to figure out what rows are actually summed up, so no way to know about doubling counting. For…

If you are trying to migrate from your own Exchange server (in our case we are using Mac Kerio Connect which emulates Exchange) to Google Apps, it is a little mysterious how to do it, but the basic idea is similar to the Office 365: First signup for Google Apps. There are third parties that…

If you’ve got a small business and want to move to Office 365 or to Google Apps, the main choice is whether you want 1TB of storage per user (Office 365) for $5/user/month or unlimited storage (Google Apps) at $10/user/month. We are going to try Office 365 as we’ve not used this system too much…

The empire strikes back! Canon fights Mirrorless Sony with a 50mp full frame. Drool. Drool!canon 5ds

I didn’t realize there was an installer that did all this at    But finishing the last installation, you can do a port install mythtv-0.27 from http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythWeb_via_MacPorts And then you’ve got a bunch of manual configuration.

Well for the first time in as long as I remember, it looks like Microsoft has a better deal than just about anyone in the cloud. We’ve been looking at moving off of our Kerio installation. It has served us well for several years and we run Mac Office and things have been pretty good. …

This is the first time I’ve seen a printer lose compatibility. Canon says that the MX700 no longer works with Yosemite. Somehow I can’t believe that it is this broken. So the investigation begins: One clue is that someone says that the Twain driver support was removed with Yosemite, but there is a fix where…

Well, Apple just uses mini Displayport (and Thunderbolt 2.0), but the world of third party monitors use many other connectors. Here’s a connector decoder ring: To HDMI. The modern Retina MacBook Pro can pus the 

As I said Appleinsider is a good place to buy. Adorama usually has the best prices for these things. The  best buy seems to be (for software developers) the MacBook Pro Retina 15″ with 16GB of memory and 256GB hard drive. But right now you can only get it in store for $2K with 3 years…

Trying to build this. We used 0.25 for a long time, but this is now obsolete. And the RAID0 drives were showing problems, so went to a complete rebuild with MythTV with MacPorts. It now uses mariadb instead of mysql. So onto running setup for Mac MythTV isn’t the same as the MacPorts setup and isn’t quite right…

One thing that isn’t well documented is what happens to Excel is there is a blank in a cell. By experimentation it turns out that the wildcard “” does *not match a blank cell, so you need to make sure that you have something in every cell if you want to match it.  Interestingly, stackoverflow…

Man the old days of Excel are long gone, now you can generate incredibly powerful array actions so easily when doing the equivalent of database lookups. As ablebits.com explains this thing starts to look like APL: So for instance to add all the cells in column C where column A has the text “apple” and…

Using Mac Excel heavily and it is good that some of my favorite commands are still there and there is a long shortcut list Most Mac keyboards, you need the additional FN key To Press Open the Formula Builder FN + SHIFT + F3 Repeat the last Find (Find Next) FN + SHIFT + F4…

A great conversation with Vlad about setting up different servers in a development environment. Many of these loads are today run in virtual machines on a single system. The latest hypervisors have reduced the VM overhead to 5% so it makes so much sense to run them virtually particularly if you dedicate a slice of…

Well, this is one shall we say “manly” laptop. I do have to say I’m spoiled by the industrial design of Apple. But nonetheless, it is certainly powerful (if amazingly thick and bulky). Here are some tips, tricks and traps: Tricks on Magic Keys The documentation is pretty unclear, but there is a BIOS setup…

I’ve been using MythTV pretty well along with XBMC. XBMC’s add-on even lets you watch MythTV recording from a HD HomeRun Prime from XBMC and it all worked fine on Mavericks. Now in the Yosemite world and also the latest XBMC now called Kodi and the new MythTV 0.27. Here are the steps: Yosemite upgrade…

Well, built the second of four Haswell towers based on the SG-10B mini-tower using the ASRock Z97m OC Formula with the Noctua NH-L12 and the Scythe Rev B: Scythe Rev B. This is a low profile fan unit. The main problem is there is no clearance possible with the heat sinks on the regulator. Also…

Some of the older applications like Unify for the Mac, need Java 6. The latest Mavericks removes the Java 6 and even if you install Java 8, it doesn’t work, so you need to install it from the Apple site as 2014-001

The SSD pricing is sure dynamic. So it’s nice that Tom’s Hardware updates this regularly which updates the Anandtech Best SSDs for July 2014 as well as StorageReview.com which did a good comparison of the Evo 850 Pro, Evo 850, Evo 840 and the Sandisk Extreme Pro which showed the 1TB Evo 850 very good…

Why would you pay an extra $50 for a cooler rather than use the stock one that Intel gives you for free? Well the answer is pretty simply put by Tom’s Hardware. The short answer is if you are not overclocking, then the Intel fan makes lots of sense Great cooling for overclocking It might…

We got three Seagate Constellation SAS drives (ST4000NM0043) drives and one thing about ZFS is that it needs to have identical drives because the number of sectors need to be the same. These were $319 and are 6GB drives. To fill this out, looking at ZFS Solaris and Aaron’s best practices, we need to add a…