Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

When you have a site that you’ve been working on and want it to be nice looking, it’s sort of the last thing you have time for. So here are some tips. Figma is a great online design tool that lets you do full wireframes and handle multiple pages. The good news is that if…

Man, there are just too many things on the Menu bar. I bought and paid for Bartender 5 and I have to say it’s nice that it is so customizable, but it’s a little too customizable, so I’m putting that one away and going back to Dozer. This is the simplest possible application and it…

OK, two quick things, I have a long post coming up on getting your Apple Home devices to work (tl;dr this is way, way, way too hard). OpenCore Legacy Patcher Long-Term Use But some quick hits for today, I have an old MacBook Pro 2014 (so just nine years old), and using OpenCore Legacy Patcher,…

OK, a quick note, I found that on some machines, my ChatGPT session would not show any history. Lots of experimentation, but NordVPN Threat Protection blocks the history on ChatGPT. Ghostery works fine and you can use a VPN, but not Threat Protection. Go figure. I also had to turn off my UniFi Ad Blocking…

Well, it’s time to get ready for the coming total eclipse and the last time we did this in 2017, I had a Canon 5D Mark II and got an elcheapo solar filter and it worked OK. I had a 70-200mm lens and got some decent images, but nothing that sharp. This time around, I…

Ok, my new Synology RS2423+ has been sitting on the floor of my server room for months and now it’s finally time to get it running. It took a long time because I first wanted to make sure my Synology DS-2413+ was backed up, this is an awesome 12-drive server and it is working well.…

Ok, here are the links, and the deeper technical issues but basically, MagSafe can charge at 7.5W, 10W or 15W and the more expensive devices support this. The bigger change is that Qi2 is coming, these only work with iPhone 15, but will be compatible with them. So if you can hold off a bit,…

I’ve been using the ESR HaloLock MagSafe which is just $22 right now on Black Friday and it mainly works well. It is true that if you hit a big bump or you have a Pro Max, it has a tendency to have the phone pop off. So off to Popular Mechanics, Gear Patrol to…

Mark told me that a buddy of his was SIM cloned and lost access to everything from his credit cards to bank to phone account, so be warned, they are out there. It looks like it might have been at a public WiFi, but from the description either a Zero-day attack (so he had less…

I’m going to do a series of posts that summarize the macro environment and the changing world around us. Now I know this will be controversial (and thank god this is not going to Twitter or Xwitter, you can figure out the pronunciation). Christmas is coming and I have to write my memo to Victor,…

Holy crap, these Meta glasses are pretty terrific. I agree the camera isn’t that great, but note to all they are wonderful for two (and a half) specific purposes: First of all, for those of you who are ADD and want a way to listen to a podcast or book tape when a meeting is…

Well, this is actually much harder than you think and it is not super well documented (and most of that documentation is not for the latest MacOS Sonoma), so here goes. Change UI to “More space” The first problem is that with the MacBook Pro’s XDR panel, the native resolution is basically 4x more dense…

OK, this was a bit of a surprise. As mentioned before, we just transferred 20TB of data from a DroboPro on USB 2.0 and got a consistent 30MBps read speed. This is consistent with what Cisco says a typical USB controller can actually handle. At 480Mbps half duplex transfer rates, this is actually pretty close…

OK, I’ve made many mistakes here with rsync where I picked the wrong flag. For a long time, I’ve wanted to use the -c or checksum flag and mistakenly thought this meant that rsync would checksum the files after the copy. This isn’t the case, what happens is that rsync will ignore the date, time,…

Well, as I’ve been recovering all kinds of cool photos, there is a collection of Beta and VHS tapes that my dad made (and I did too) that I’ve been meaning to copy and I saw the Elgato Video Capture which is a $80 device that you has S-VHS and Component video output on one…

OK, our Tesla is five years old now and it has held up pretty well, but we had two unusual problems. Hope you don’t have them, but in case you do here you go:

Well, there has been so much written about this and I thought Sean Carroll was particularly articulate about grading possibilities. The good news is that he actually transcribes all his answers, so here they are: It is in his August 2023 Ask Me Anything where: Kevin HarrangI learned a lot from your recent discussion about…

There are so many different things that can go wrong when connecting drives, my buddy Dean had a huge problem when he tried to plug a USB Drive into his M1 Mac, it caused kernel panics. The problem I’m diagnosing now is similar, I’m having startup and speed problems. The machine configuration is very odd:…

OK, I’ve been running the same Raspberry Pi 4 with the Homebridge image for the last three years and I finally had an issue with it. Homebridge is a node application, so it requires regular updates to pick up new Nodejs versions and also updates to the Homebridge itself and then all the plugins, so…

OK, I couldn’t help it, there was a 50% off sale on the OWC ThunderBay so I had to go out and get it. Basically, I got an enclosure for the same price as eight 12TB drives which is quite a deal. They shipped very promptly (sorry Dean that yours is segment faulting, I’ll help…

Man, the world has changed a lot since my days learning about silicon fabrication. Back then things were pretty easy, if you had a 10-micron process, that means you made a transistor with wires that could at most be 10 microns wide. Well, hold onto your hats, the world has gotten a lot more complicated,…

So it looks like there are going to be some big changes coming to Apple and this could signal that the relatively slow updates to the Mac line are ending (and don’t get me started on the dog breakfast that is the iPad). But at the top level, the way to think about this is…

Well, there are some discounts that seem to be coming on and off. With all these price increases from NetFlix to Apple One to Disney, it’s nice to be able to save some money. As a reminder, there are historically low prices for SSDs and hard drives right now, so if you need them it’s…

OK, there is this new idea of a passkey that is rolling out and you can look here to see if a site supports it, but the big ones are amazon.com, Best Buy, Google, GitHub, eBay, Instacart, PayPal, Shopify, Tailscale, Synology, Uber. The idea is pretty simple, just as you can FaceID unlock your phone…

Wow, Gestures are the coolest and most hidden feature in MacOS Sonoma, but basically, if you are in any kind of video call (Zoom, Meets, etc.), there is an application-independent way to get gesture recognition. Enabling it is nearly impossible when you start your video camera, there is a green icon in the menubar and…

Uh, I thought I had been pretty careful keeping Cruft off of my Mac, but I started getting these scam notifications saying “You have been infected”. WTF! Basic Hygiene: Look for SYSTEMALERT in Safari > Settings > Websites I know exactly what happened, to get a great deal, I had to turn off my many…

Well, I can’t quite believe it, but it feels like it is 1999. Temu has the most incredible triple-stacked deals, here is how it works: Net, net, just with the credit card stuff, you are 36% off and then you add another $20 off with the $20+$60 or 25% off, so that’s definitely not bad.…

OK, a final followup to the move from Google Workspace to iCloud, I finally got this to work after figuring out the CNAME problem, but what happened is that the Netlify changes to the DNS would not take. I discovered that when you are making lots of changes, Netlify does not properly update. So I…