Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

OK, with the new M.2 SSDs and also lots of SSDs, you do need to be careful when building machines. Here are some notes: The new M.2 slots on motherboards share PCI Express slots with SATA. So when you install your SSDs, make sure you do not use the SATAs that are dedicated to the…

It is incredible what folks charge for things that should be free. They seem to rely on people forgetting what is going on and automatic charging. My buddy Holden had a web site package for $140 a year that was essentially just forwarding email. If you have the same problem here is how to get…

Well trying to get the Raspberry Pi back up and running and so many good things have happened in the last three years. Here’s the quickest way: Install latest hypriot from https://blog.hypriot.com/downloads. The latest is 0.7. The main thing I’m not sure of is how to update the latest version of hypriot. This version has…

I’ve been busy recovering lots of camera work. The latest is getting the Xiaoyi cameras working again. Some quick notes: Tawbaware.com. It has a 12Mp Sony sensor and a Ambarella A7 processor just like the GoPro Hero 4. You can actually changed the fixed focus by rotating the ring. It is set to be in…

I’ve had one friend with mold everywhere on her waterpik. They don’t talk about it enough, but when I opened up the bottom of the pik, I did see green mold. And also in the area above and around. The recommendation is to use vinegar, but bleach seems much stronger. Also eventually the interior of…

I had always thought that this was pretty much a lost cause. I have quite a few corrupted JPEG files. I had a bad RAID array and it wiped out a bunch of files. Now with scrubbing and more reliable drives, I hope this doesn’t happen anymore, but it looks like there are some programs…

Thank goodness for Reddit, I’ve been using Handbrake to get DVDs that folks make (yes there are still some who are doing this, I don’t know why) and ripping them into mp4. This now seems to hang on El Capitan. I do not know who is still ripping copy protected DVDS, but here’s the tip.…

I must have done this a million times, but each time I have to painfully go through the steps again and they do seem to change. Here are the points that seem to work today for El Capitan and Ubuntu 14.04.4. There is an alternative setup that doesn’t use rEFInd and just hacks around with…

Read about oculus rift notes on poor graphics support on Mac. And then discovered it’s actually reasonably easy to run Mac OS X on intel hardware thanks to Tony.  I’m not quite sure why I would need it but what the heck some folks want it for cost I would guess. 

OK way too many nerd thoughts today: 16-bit vs 8-bit color and 5400 vs 2700 dpi resolution scanning. I’m scanning lots of old photos. Until now I’ve been using JPEG because they are small, but the lack of 16-bit color has really bothered me. Even snapshots with crappy cameras show light and dark issues with…