Tong Family

Well, I’ve been delaying getting a new watch for a relatively long time. We started with a Series 1 and got them for the kids. But the short battery life and not needing notifications plus hoe slow it was was a limitation. The new focus on Health has changed that plus having cellular as a…

OK so this is a Monday question, for a long time I’ve just wanted Emoji’s inside Vim, so what are the considerations to make this work: Why you want everything in UTF-8 First of all just to demystify, an emoji to a computer is just another Unicode character. Unicode is a huge character set that…

OK, this is a strange bug that you need to watch out for. With all this work-from-home, I’ve had trouble on one machine getting onto our VPN. And while we’ve not had much trouble with Zoom and so forth. We are lucky to have 300Mbps/20Mbps upload with Comcast. However last night, suddenly Zoom really slowed…

Well both our ASUS PB278s seems a bit flaky. No matter what I try I can’t get one of them to reliable turn on. It sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I tried the HDMI connection and the DisplayPort and rebooting the Mac. When I change it for a Benq 32 it works fine. Both of…

OK here are the crazy list of things that my three “Just in from Windows” friends, Mark, John and Dave are having. Hopefully both are loving that M1 MacBooks (yes, I’m jealous, trying to hold out for the next generation coming this year, but I don’t know!). So here are notes from the many phone…

Argh two Google problems today. The first is really annoying, I downloaded an extension that would force Dark Mode on Chrome, but when I uninstalled it, the backgrounds were still DARK. Argh! I tried changing the Dark mode on the Mac and also changing the default Theme. It turns out that plug in actually turns…

Well, this is a truly nerdy post, but I just read that with Superhuman worth hundreds of millions, everyone is back to building the Superhuman of X keyboard shortcuts as the way to get common applications faster. I completely agree with that and those of us who have used vi forever sure know that is…

OK, suppose that you are too paranoid to get on an airplane and instead decide that any trip within 1,200 km of your home city are fair game for a road trip. What do you need to make the trip as safely as possible. Here are some notes 🙂 Safety Stuff: Of Snow tires and…

This has been bothering me for literally a year. I can’t seem to get rid of these relentless emails from Microsoft Teams. If I want to see random water cooler chatter I would ask for it. Finally, the latest email from them tells you exactly how to shut it off… Update your email preferences in…

Well, I have NordVPN with it’s Cybersec ad blocking and also run Safari with UBlock and while it seems to block some ads, a bunch more seem to appear. So to welcome in 2021, let’s see how to figure out how effective these are. I normally use open source blockers like UBlock origin or KaBlock!…