Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

I finally got six weeks worth of Amazon orders and gadgets, and here is a review of the various components: Here are the ones I haven’t tried but will review shortly, but here are some automotive and things: The accessories for the Zoom Studio I’ve been building: Then there are Apple Home devices which are…

Well, it took six months to figure out how to do it, but Brave has this feature where they throw up ads and then pay you in their own coin and it is complicated to get this running and to get the money out. Here are the steps: So if you are still using

Well, there was a time when international roaming was a real hassle. You had to find a store (typically at the airport, then get a new sim, you had to bring a separate phone to make this all run). The move to eSims: From iPhone X to iPhone 14 iPhone lets you use two SIMs…

Well, the 2023 models are out and supply chains have normalized so Bob asked us about what flat panel to buy. The main thing is that the 4K HDR television market has really stabilized and prices are pretty reasonable but if you want super high quality here are some choices The best three TVs seem…

Ok, so against my better judgement I decided to save $5/month and get xFi Complete. You basically use the xfinity cable gateway (a combo cable modem, WiFi access point and switch) because it comes bundled with the $30/month unlimited data. What a mistake! The box arrived and it plugged it in. First of all it…

Well it’s been three and a half years since the start of the pandemic and one of my projects was to fix all the lighting around the house from very high-energy incandescent to LED. So I have a set of lights from 2017 that have been going for six years and a set from 2020…

For a long time, it seemed like it was a decades-long Christmas of lower prices with better services, well no more. So now is the time to be a little more careful with what you are doing. The good or bad news is they are going to discover how price-elastic people are. There are definitely…

Well with the lockdowns ending the new competition basis for service providers is a dizzying array of ways to optimize the rising inflation in streaming services, delivery and car services. So here’s a master thread on this. It’s inverted from normal. That is it covers categories rather than providers: Streaming Someone finally noticed that streaming…

apple.news/A2AFAVmudRwiLpKxLLJ-4PQ This is actually a super good idea. Thieves are now watching you type your passcode, then stealing your phone and changing your Apple account password locking you out and stealing your second factor. The fix is to turn on Screentime Passcode and then enable Content & Privacy Restrictions and disallow to your for passcode…

Man, I’ve been using Google Slides for years and there are two things I’ve never been able to figure out. The first has to do with the many differences between the Web app and the iPad/iPhone. There are many things that have bothered me, but the biggest one is multiple selection (and the related align…

There are a couple of steps to get this to work right because there are a couple of problems to get a Zoom background: So the fix is a little painful but it does work:

Paul asked me a great question. He has a UDM running in a hot room and the temperature is 83C. That sounds pretty terribly warm but the room is 30C ambient. So that got me to wondering. First where is the CPU temperature anyway. (I can’t wait for all computer interfaces to go natural language…

Okay, we have no less than 119 connections (most are burglar alarm points) and with Apple Home in the last week, they’ve all suddenly become unavailable. It could be because of iOS 16.5 The Airplay to our HomePod Mini’s work and the fixes are pretty draconian. Like, reset all your devices. I can’t tell you…

OK, for those of you still Zoom culture, I tidied up my Zoom stuff, and here are some notes:

OK, the last question is that when you have a modern format like Apple Spatial Audio which appears as Dolby Atmos that is going to an old AVR that doesn’t have this format, at least on my Denon, we get two mysterious options, the first is Direct which just means you get stereo, all these…

OK, this setup has actually worked pretty well for three years, but lately, with Ventura, I’ve been having this problem: The trick I was using that since the old Denon only supports HD input, I would normally route all the inputs for the system through the AVR and then to the LG, but instead, I…

Thanks to the incredible Walt Mossberg, he’s on Thread and reminded me that I guess I’m a true Swiftie: My five favorite Taylor Swift albums: Favorite song: All Too Well (10 minute version) But there are excellent songs on every one of her albums, since she’s a truly great songwriter. Walt Mossberg, Thread.net, 2023-07-20 Since…

This week I’ve been trying to do reading in the Kindle Papetwhite which is a nice device but I basically never use it because I’ve zero time to read. But recently I joined a study group where there are no audiobooks for the readings. There is a kindle version or a pdf. Sort of a…