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

Wow what a great day for low cost processors. The conversion to 64 bit is on and that means much simpler software development. We are moving away from the strange hybrid architecture of the original Raspberry Pi (ARMv6 with hardware floating point) to 64-bit and fast GPUs. Also the busses are getting better so some…

OK more than a day, but there was a bad update where Apple accidentally blacklisted their own driver (ugh, I’m sure someone is getting yelled at right now). It should be fixed automatically if you are using the automatic update feature. Mine was broken at on Friday and fixed Saturday at 530PM, so software update…

Well, we got a pretty amazing server two years ago and it is interesting to see how little has changed, most of the parts are still good (Haswell-E), but the main thing that has changed are: SSDs in Server NVMe. Wow boot drives and cache drives are much faster. With a Xeon platform there are…

Wow the service run by Obitalk is pretty incredible. It has some incredible features using Google Voice and it works with a burglar alarm as well. It also has no FCC fees as well and you can hear your voice mail on Google Voice. Of course who knows how secure any of this is really…

Time once again for my monthly security reminders here is what I learned (relearned): iMessage. This is actually quite a safe protocol. It is zero knowledge in that Apple cannot read the messages while in transit. Way better than sending a text or email both are unencrypted. The main vulnerabilities are that Apple can be…

Lots in the news about cracking iPhones. Here’s some net net advice Let us all hope that iOS 10 not only signs updates with their key but also encrypts with the user passcode.  For the current iPhone the easy thing to do is to use TouchID and then bump up the passcode from 4 digits…

Wow what a difference two years make. We are now in free fall for tvs and HDR is coming as well. There is also a convergence happening as tvs get full operating systems and arm chips So here is a quick review of what to get depending on needs. Hat tip to the wirecutter Computer…

Never had so much fun learning about a new topic or building a computer but at last I have a reason to want a $5k desktop! arriving in two days! Of course since then it’s pretty clear that instead of the i7 we should Xeon e5-1650 v3. It’s the same chip and costs the same…

Most of notes now go to slack. It’s so convenient to post there as I do most things in my phablet these days. 

Wow this is a cool application. it uses a web browser on the Mac and then you use a QR code to connect it to an Android device. This gives the local IP address of the Mac to the phone and somehow the browser application can facilitate the transfer