Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

OK, somehow we are buying mainly ASRock boards these days, some hard won tips, tricks and traps: ASRock H97i This is a nice non-overclockable board for about $100. We are using it for our basic machines. The main things to note are: The m.2 slot is on the back and isn’t well documented. There is…

Wow the documentation for this is so confusing mainly because most of the google things don’t cover how the latest release of Ubuntu actually works. The good news is that many things are now automatic. So to cover the tricks and traps here; Ubuntu file sharing via SMB This actually as easy as the Mac…

How frustrating, one of the cool things about Unifi and their older product line is how they manager zero handoff. This is needed because most clients are stupid. They hold on to a wifi signal for way too long. What you want in a good environment is for there to be enough coverage (without interference)…

Got a great kit from makesmith as part of my Kickstarter addiction. It’s a do it yourself CNC machine. You just need a dremel and it can cut nearly any soft material. But you need to supply your own Dremel. Popular Mechanics has a good review of what is technically called a rotary tool: Dremel…

Motherboard vendors have so many identical motherboards and it is so hard to tell what does what. Asrock for instance has four nearly identical Z97M motherboards. Only with a detailed comparison can you see the difference: Z97M OC Formula and the Fatality are both $135. There doesn’t seem to be any difference except for a…

It sure is complicated figuring out which sites have the best price with complex discount and other structures: Appleinsider is a good place to start with very reputable vendors and it shows that for a MacBook Pro Retina that the prices have tightened up a bit. We got our last one for $2450 or so,…

Inspired by reading all those Tom’s Hardware reviews, if you need to upgrade your hardware and can’t wait for full 802.11ac Wave 2, then here are your options. Smallnetbuilder.com seems to have the best reviews of these things. Most of the big sites don’t cover this in too much detail, but I find that for…

Well, we finally got our file server running and with three SAS drives to practice with, it’s time to learn how to use ZFS. For convenience we are using Ubuntu and there are some handy instructions for installing it on Trusty Tahr (14.04) annotated with notes from arstechnica.com The instructions are pretty easy for installation:…

Wow, I can’t believe how convenient this is. I’m in the middle of converting all by recent Haswell buy recommendations into PCPartpicker lists so it is easy to replicate. Thanks so much whoever made this incredible site with: Compatibility checking. You just pick things and you are much more sure everything will fit. I don’t…