Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Wow the documentation for this is so confusing mainly because most of the google things don’t cover how the latest release of Ubuntu actually works. The good news is that many things are now automatic. So to cover the tricks and traps here; Ubuntu file sharing via SMB This actually…

How frustrating, one of the cool things about Unifi and their older product line is how they manager zero handoff. This is needed because most clients are stupid. They hold on to a wifi signal for way too long. What you want in a good environment is for there to…

Got a great kit from makesmith as part of my Kickstarter addiction. It’s a do it yourself CNC machine. You just need a dremel and it can cut nearly any soft material. But you need to supply your own Dremel. Popular Mechanics has a good review of what is technically…

Motherboard vendors have so many identical motherboards and it is so hard to tell what does what. Asrock for instance has four nearly identical Z97M motherboards. Only with a detailed comparison can you see the difference: Z97M OC Formula and the Fatality are both $135. There doesn’t seem to be…

It sure is complicated figuring out which sites have the best price with complex discount and other structures: Appleinsider is a good place to start with very reputable vendors and it shows that for a MacBook Pro Retina that the prices have tightened up a bit. We got our last…

Inspired by reading all those Tom’s Hardware reviews, if you need to upgrade your hardware and can’t wait for full 802.11ac Wave 2, then here are your options. Smallnetbuilder.com seems to have the best reviews of these things. Most of the big sites don’t cover this in too much detail,…

Well, we finally got our file server running and with three SAS drives to practice with, it’s time to learn how to use ZFS. For convenience we are using Ubuntu and there are some handy instructions for installing it on Trusty Tahr (14.04) annotated with notes from arstechnica.com The instructions…

Wow, I can’t believe how convenient this is. I’m in the middle of converting all by recent Haswell buy recommendations into PCPartpicker lists so it is easy to replicate. Thanks so much whoever made this incredible site with: Compatibility checking. You just pick things and you are much more sure…