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

I had not realized how many fixes were in there…but thanks to Tom’s Hardware that is clear: Six digit PIN. You should move to that or use Touch ID Two factor authentication. You need to have another device to login to El Capitan or iOS 9. Although a pain, it is very secure. LibreSSL vs…

I was wondering when this would happen. We have had great success with using an aquarium chiller in a mineral-oil cooled PC. Keeps the temperature down to 70C from 80C for just oil bath or 90C for air cooled even with the best cooler made (Noctua DH-14).  Sso phonoroic Hex 1.0 is a “mild” cooler…

It was kind of fun to do a series on what my life has been like in different things I’ve used… My life in languages: Shanghainese, Mandarin, English, French, Russian, PDP-8 Toggling, Basica, Mac-80 Assembler, C, Pascal, Mandarin (again!), RPL, C++, 1-2-3 Macros, Excel, HTML, PHP, Mandarin (again!!), Bash, Python, Javascript,… My life in keyboards:…

OK, maybe it is just a philosophy, but I do think that everything you need to learn is already in a book somewhere. After all with 7 billion or so people alive and billions who have written books literally, the only problem is finding the right one, so here’s my list of books that I…

No one is getting any younger, but Calvin mentioned in a a very cool webrtc conference call (appear.io is incredible) that his grandfather worked on information theory. It is one of those things lost in time, but 60 years ago was an incredible time for the basis of information theory. From Shannon to McCluskey, the…

Well, in the last two years, I’ve been way to glib about things. So now is the time to straighten up. There seems to be no really good guide about how to do this, but the steps are basically: Secure your passwords The advice here is good but it takes a long time to make…

We’ve been using mythtv for a while, but now it has a corrupted mariadb so nothing records. We have to start all over and the instructions are clear about getting rid of the software but not the man configuration and database files thanks to Mac Ports, this is much easier.   Note that the second…

OK, more stuff that no one cares about. About two years ago, we got a Razor keyboard. It cost more than many computers do ($140), but it had the famous Cherry Blue switches. These reminded me of the original IBM PC. Click and clack, but boy did they feel sure and sharp. Now we just…

I was stupid and installed Ubuntu on top of a Windows 7 and Windows 8 dual boot configuration. The result was that Ubuntu was fine, but those systems were lost. Googling, I found I could create a USB boot from an ISO with Rufus from a running Windows system. The other ways didn’t work. It…

Well it has been a busy two weeks of hacking away. Two main things have been struggling with understanding how Scons (a kind of super make works) by wrestling with it controlling the installs of a Cmake, Bjam and Node-gyp and npm installed programs. This stuff is not easy particularly when you get 300,000 lines…