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Continue reading →: mac: Tahoe Unsigned App tap dance and reset of third party menubar buried in System SettingsWell, sometimes there is an intentional obscuring of “unsigned” apps (like Stats). Before Tahoe MacOS 26, you could just right-click and choose to open anyway. But now it’s a pretty unintuitive thing, you have to fail trying to run it and then go to System Settings and click a button:…
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Continue reading →: hike: Lessons from Climbing at AltitudeOK, we normally do day hikes or short camping trips, but we’ve never done a long five-day hike from 4-5km up (yes, that’s 16,000 feet in altitude). learned a lot about what it takes to get up there, and here are some tips if you are similarly inclined, but here…
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Continue reading →: music: Background Music for Final Cut ProOK, here is one frustrating thing: if you are trying to do a nice video (for friends) and want to get a nice soundtrack, the copy protection with Apple Music makes it impossible to add a track for your movie in Final Cut Pro. Looking at what you actually get,…
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Continue reading →: mac: Fix Tahoe menubar missing 3rd party appsWell, this is a frustrating one. You boot up your Mac, and suddenly ALL yourthird-party menu bar icons have vanished. 1Password? Gone. AlDente? Disappeared.MonitorControl? Nowhere to be found. The apps are running (you can see them in Activity Monitor), but the menu bar is acting like they don’t exist. The…
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Continue reading →: home: Nest Displaying a ClockIt is actually harder than you think with these smart devices to make things work exactly the way you want. Someday, it will be as easy as “Always display the time when I walk by my Next thermostat” But in the meantime, you need to know how to use Farsight…
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Continue reading →: net: UniFi VPN to Home Teleport eratic, Wireguard worksWell, we’ve had two cases where we want to access our Unifi network at home. In one case to get a Time Machine backup finished and also to access the home servers. The documentation is just terrible, so here’s a quick guide as of October 2, 2025 Teleport: Load WifiMan…
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Continue reading →: tech: APC Smart-UPS 1500 SMC1500 Battery Replacement: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build My Own Battery PacksLong story short, if your trusty old APC Smart-UPS 1500 (SMC1500) is making that annoying beeping noise, it’s time for new batteries. I’ve been down this road more times than I care to count (sigh, the joys of running a home lab), and here’s everything I’ve learned about replacing these…
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Continue reading →: dev: Massive YAML file debuggingWell for a variety of reasons, all of our ultra cool agents, we have a nearly 6,000 line single YAML file that is our base configuration. So it is nearly impossible to figure out what is wrong because it is not incorrect syntax, but the tool (TNE Compass if you…
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Continue reading →: dev: Agonies of 1Password op injectThis is a really useful command. Previously, we’ve been using “op read” to get items from 1Password. Man is it slow, even though you are logged into 1Password on the client, it takes a about a second for each of say 25 API keys to get pulled. Why 25 do…
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Continue reading →: wp: The mysteries of Inmotion Hosting SSL CertificatesWe just had our main SSL certificate “die” on Netlify. I’m not sure why but a TXT record got truncated. This reminded me I’ve had another long standing issue with tongfamily.com where every so often I would get an invalid SSL certificate. Well, I tried gemini-cli to figure this out…
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