Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

OK, now that Google has been raising prices, I’m in the middle of moving accounts from the $6/month for 30GB of storage and email or $18/month for 2TB to iCloud Custom Domains. iCloud allows each family to have up to five custom email domains and you get 2TB of storage across your whole family, so…

If you don’t want to spend a lot on these, I think the current best solution is based on Aqara and then smoke alarms by Life. We’ve been testing this for the past few months at our house and to make an alarm system, you can build an Apple Home system with parts from Aqara,…

Well, I’ve been trying different ways to take notes for a while. The traditional way is really disruptive, typing into your laptop is really hard to hide and not notice. A traditional pad and paper can work if you use a cool fountain pen, then you can take photos of it, but it is hard…

So, you think that “A Bucket of Chicken” is not a good name for your company because abucketofchicken.com is taken, well the answer is that it’s actually pretty easy in the modern world to change the name of your company, here are the steps: Add your new domain names to Namecheap, Netlify, and Google Workspace…

Well, the good old USB C cables are getting a bit of a makeover, there are two innovations that are just great:

OK, a small detail with Ventura (and Sonoma), the System Preferences gave way to System Settings and everything moved around. One of the more annoying places is with keyboard modifiers, the Option key ⌥ and Command Key ⌘. The confusing thing is where swapping these two keys went. The Mac keyboards flips the location of…

Well, I’ve been busy as the Apple Home is rapidly evolving through a combination of Homebridge plug-ins that allow great access to all devices and also the coming of Matter and Thread. So I’m working on two things: Apple Home Architecture Update What has happened this quarter is that we moved to the new Apple…

Now why would you ever want to do this, well, in my case, I have a Thunderbolt doc so can get to the LAN at 1Gbps (and someday 2.5Gbps if I ever get the time to add a 2.5Gbps switch and upgrade my NAS to 2.5Gbps from the current 2x 1Gbps, all this is planned).…

Well, we’ve been waiting a long time for older devices like the Unifi Dream Machine and the Unifi Dream Machine Pro to finally move from the 1.x branch to the new 3.0 and it finally happened about three months ago. Having migrated five UDMs and a UDM Pro. Evan McCann as usual has a great…

OK, I haven’t had such a terrible travel experience in 10 years, but some notes (for those of you who want to avoid the disastrous trip we just went through): Connections have at least a day layover (especially NYC, Chicago) Don’t, just don’t. But if you have to then if you are transiting a tough…

Well this piece summarizes it well. iPhones 12, 13 and 14 support MagSafe with a 15W maximum and can use Qi chargers but only up to 7.5W (and sometimes 5W). The new Qi2 chargers use the same magnets as the MagSafe and will provide 15W but only for qi2 compatible phones. Only the new iPhone…