Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well we are testing ghost and getting away from WordPress. It’s been a great ride, but nice to learn a new system that is running on node.js and which is much simpler. I’m going to run the two in parallel for a while at tongfamily.com and richtong.org, so stay tuned. In the mean time some…

Wow this is a little complicated but getting Digital Ocean to work is a little complicated, but here are some tips: Ssh into Digital Ocean Droplet When you into the thing, you are using the root password, so you need to look at your droplet IP. Unlike things like bluehost you get a unique IP…

Ok last post on the file server topic. Vlad pointed out that there are two storage layers here. That is near line SAS plus a PC3500 when it’s available for high speed ssd. So with 20 slots in a Norco 4220 you could easily add a caching Sata ssd layer as well. So you end…

Well, I’ve been much more focused this year on using portals and getting cash back rewards. I would say about 30% of the times I’ve tried this, the rebate doesn’t work. And folks are smart, it isn’t worth it to make a transaction for $1 work right and there is no record you have that…

Wow you can see why Tesla is so valuable. I had no idea. The i3 is actually doing pretty well  which was surprising: The Focus Electric has been an absolute sales dud for Ford, although not nearly as bad as the Cadillac ELR. Through September of 2014, Ford only managed to sell 1,534 Focus Electric EVs. Even BMW’s…

It’s interesting to think about how to do this. Linux is so amazing because this support is: Included the Linux 2.4 kernel as part of USB Gadget Driver Android includes the drivers so that any Android build can use USB-on-the-Go PLX 3380 is a registered compatible 2280 (the USB 2.0 version) USB3380EVB is a PCI…

Well done with big file servers for now, what about really small systems with great graphics. The new Haswell-E has allowed building really small units: Gigabyte BRIX Pro is a good example. For $600, you get a 8-core Core i7 with its embedded graphics. Sure it’s loud but kind of amazing that with a 135 watt…

This will get incorporated into the new Haswell file server post but it’s big a bulky on the topic of DDR4 and LRDIMM: DDR4 DDR3 has been around forever and the stock ones are typically 1600MHz but range from 800 to 2200MTs, but DDR4 starts at 2100MTs eventually up to 4200 Mts! As an aside…

It seems like it never ends. Here’s a new problem with SSL using SSL v3 encryption. You have to make sure to disable it in your browser or check the site to make sure it doesn’t accept it. Firefox has an add-on that turns SSL v3 off. Chrome has a command flag. There isn’t any…

Got to love the internet, got just the coolest solder and hot gun engine today. Of course there are no directions that make any sense, so thank goodness for Youtube, with lovely musak, here’s how to assemble it! See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NUqV2tGApg

It is incredible sometimes how prices fall. Just a few months ago the sweet spot for pricing was the 16GB microSD card. You could get those for about $10. Now the pricing curve for a Class 10/UHS-1 (so a decently fast card at 10MBps) is: 8GB: $8 16GB: $9-12. Amazon seems to have really low…

Well it seems like hard drive failure month for me. Here are the drives, for personal machines, we are putting SSDs in as they are much faster and more reliable iMac 2009. Yuck, this one is going to be hard to get out. It’s buried and I have to figure out how to get the…

Given how tough the last releases have been particularly with iOS 7.0 and 8.0 and Mavericks (which seemed pretty rough), I have to say I’m surprised by how smooth 8.1 and Yosemite have gone. Seems like it runs the same if not faster on old hardware. Our venerable iMac 2009 seems to like it (albeit…

Not surprising really: Tunnelblick. This is an OpenVPN system. Seems to hang network access on Yosemite. This gets fixed by the latest update to Tunnelblick. You have to manually down load it. Lastpass. Seems to forget the email and that I have already typed a password. This gets fixed by the latest version of Lastpass,…

Well, this is so typically Apple, when it works it just works, but when it doesn’t who knows why. I just updated to Yosemite OS X 10.10 (when are they finally going to OS X 11 I wonder 🙂 and iOS 8.1. Things seem to be going very well and amazingly after a little delay,…

Both nVidia and AMD are going to ship their next video card generation (the 880?) next year on 20nm. Wow, what a tough time to be buying cards. It sounds like, if you can wait, then you might want to see that turn of the crank. Rumor is less power required and maybe cheaper. That…

OK, it is a bit eccentric, but when you have 10,000 or so photos a year (?!!) that need to get processed, you begin to rely on yourself more and less on software. That is I’ve had various photo programs (iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom) lose databases and crash several times. Also I’ve had bad hard drives…

This is a nice 20MP camera merged into a phone: The Panasonic Lumix DMC-CM1 is a 1″ sensor with a 28mm F/2.8 leica DC lense and full manual controls and 4K video. via Cinema5d.com GoPro’s latest Hero 4 does 4Kp30 video and it will finally have a touchscreen so you can see what is going on:…