Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, now we are getting somewhere, I finally disabled All-in-one SEO because I saw how much resource it took looking at Query Monitor. I noticed that both Monster Insights and SEO All-in-one were putting up Headline suggestions, so I tried that in the quest to keep reducing, and suddenly things are under control. I hope…

Yes that’s right after a five-month hiatus where I’ve been busy figuring out all things AI and a bunch of new startup ideas, this Christmas break, I’m finally back at it, so here is a quick tour of the new setup. I think the sound is much nicer and also I’m getting a handle on…

It is incredible how knowledge can fade, I last did a podcast back on July 14, 2023, and am just starting again, I learned a bunch of new things I can’t wait to share and forgot, but here’s a quick list of things that I forgot and finally know how to do:

Just testing to see what is going on, I installed a bunch of monitoring plugins. One thing that I discovered quickly is that when I rebooted the system, I was constantly at 100% CPU and then on reboot, it dropped down to the more normal 20-40%, but after a little bit, the CPU load shot…

Well, as I told you I did a bunch of WordPress work last week to keep the disk from overflowing, but this week, I’m finding that WordPress is stalling at 100% CPU utilization for minutes after a post, so time once again to figure out what is wrong. I did get the general performance down…

Well, I spent an entire two weeks figuring this out. The background is that I got a new Synology RS2423+ which is a pretty awesome piece of hardware. It is a 2U rackmount with 12 drive bays. I got it all running and then I hit the first problem. I’ve been using Synology Snapshot Replication.…

OK, I’m a complete idiot, I remember reading a post about making sure your microphone is not pointed backward. The Rode NT-1A is cardiod directional. As an aside, the NT-1A came out in 2004 and there was an older NT-1, but the currently named NT-1 is actually later and is in its fifth generation ($240…

OK, I have a Shure V83F shotgun mike on top of our Sony A7R Mark III in our studio setup. With a 50mm F/1.4 lens at about 2.5 meters, it’s the perfect setup for two people. With a 25mm F/2, it works great with four people. One of the hard things though is setting up…

OK, now that we have the tongfamily.com site running at about three seconds, this is three times as fast as before (9 seconds), we are getting an 84/100 from Pagespeed and the built-in Boost is showing us at 92/100 for Desktop and 55/100 for Mobile (with JetPack Boost CSS and Javascript plus Image CDN raising…

OK, so I read some more posts about how to analyze speed, turns out that the free pagespeed.web.dev is just awesome, it will tell you what’s going on with mobile and desktop. The gtmatrix is also good but unless you pay you are getting a 28-day average which is less useful (except to show how…

Tl;dr for Steve, if you can you should wait for the M3 versions of the MacBook Air 13″ and 15″. The M3 just launched this fall and it looks like all the MacBook Airs will get updated in 2024, so if you can it’s not a bad idea to wait to get the extra 15%…

OK, this has been on my list for a long time, I first started by saying I would learn Go first, but that is going to take a long time, with so many blogs that I need to get running right away, I decided to just bite the bullet like last time and start again.…

Well, the thing about MacOS is that when you are out of disk space, it is hard to know what to do, you have a couple of built-in options that are imprecise or slow: Free Disk Inspection One of the nice things the Internet is that there a bunch of free utilities that will help…

OK, this is a small but confusing thing. With iCloud, you get a base of 5GB of free storage for each family member. Needless to say this doesn’t last long, with a few two-minute videos, you are going to be a 4GB. So, if you buy the $0.99/month plan you get 50GB, the problem is…

OK, now that I’m finished with Darktable, onto making videos with Final Cut Pro so here is version 3 tips and tricks on yet another incredibly deep product, Final Cut Pro Here are the ones that I found (and keep forgetting): If you want to watch the videos that explain it, here they are here’s…

Well, this is a strange one. Three years ago we had a bunch of instability with WordPress on DigitalOcean because we were running out of memory, so I installed a swapfile with some magic commands. Then two years ago, I had another set of WordPress crashes because certbot on two old multi-user sites that no…

Well, I can’t stand the idea of paying so much for Adobe Lightroom, so I ended up using DxO for years and years, but now DxO is sort of doing the same thing with annual upgrades, so to go from my current DxO 4 to DxO7 is $226, so this made me wonder if I…

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…