rich
rich
@rich@tongfamily.com
6,913 posts
4 followers
  • Tesla batteries 18650 vs 2170

    Well it is pretty incredible that all these fancy cars are basically filled with AA Lithium Ion batteries, that’s not exactly completely true, but there is nothing that special. Here’s the scoop on batteries. The current Model X and S have 18650 Lithium Ion batteries. These are standard batteries that are 18mm in diameter and…

  • Mac Photos scans for faces and objects

    Wow this is a pretty cool feature I had no idea about. I’ve uploaded 50K photos (and 1K videos) into iCloud Photo Library. Now Mac Photos is silently analyzing them all for images. For those of you worried about privacy, all the photos are encrypted and Apple cannot see them. One of the problems is…

  • Waiting out Tesla and other EV improvements

    Well, now that the Model 3 production is so well covered, time now to think about what happens in 2019 and 2020 with the new cars coming. Unlike traditional cars, electric vehicles are on an amazingly rapid timeline. While many of the changes (like full self driving) are mainly software improvements there are some key…

  • Gitlab protects master branches

    Ok still learning the differences between Github and gitlab. The good news is that the basic git commands do work properly between them, but the semantics are a little different. The biggest difference is that GitHub.com is completely flat, there is no hierarchy of repos, whereas with gitlab, you can have arbitrary nest of projects and…

  • Massive folders in /var/folders

    Well, we have one Mac with just (I can’t believe I’m saying just), 256GB of SSD. This is not very much because the system and applications need about 60GB and then with iCloud Photo Library and other sundries, it is hard to stay below 120GB. The solution have been an external drive with a RAID1…

  • Seattle to San Diego Road Trip!

    Well we’ve been up and down the I-5 corridor I don’t know how many times but a dear friend asked me what are some great stops on a 10 day journey from Seattle all the way down the coast. Here are some suggestions. As luck would have it USA Today just published a piece on…

  • MacBook Pro High Sierra Update Fails if Encryption not complete

    Ok one thing that folks don’t cover is that if you try to do a High Sierra upgrade (and probably any other upgrade), you get strange results if you have not complete FileVault Encryption. One of our MacBook Pro’s was in the middle of doing encryption and then we tried to run an upgrade. The…

  • Using an old Garmin 800 when Garmin Connect cannot sync

    I have an old Garmin 800 and trying to get it to run on the Mac is not simple. Here are the quick tips. First you need the Garmin Express drivers, the easiest way for geeks is to run brew install Garmin-connect or go to the site and download it. Then you want to connect the…

  • PowerTap P-1 Pedal a year later, cleat covers and Stages Power LR alternative

    Wow, pretty amazing that all that technology can fit into a single set of pedals, but these things really do reliably report power to a Garmin 800 cyclocomputer (if only getting the data out of that thing was as easy, but that’s another post). Note that these thing do take Lithium AA batteries, so order…

  • Moving from Google Contacts to Apple

    If you are concerned about security, the new scheme where Apple cannot see your contacts, calendars and photos, but it isn’t super easy to move things. So here’s a quick list for how to do it. Moving Contacts There are really two steps to move your contacts. First go to google.com/contacts and export the contacts into…