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

Trying to build this. We used 0.25 for a long time, but this is now obsolete. And the RAID0 drives were showing problems, so went to a complete rebuild with MythTV with MacPorts. It now uses mariadb instead of mysql. So onto running setup for Mac MythTV isn’t the same as the MacPorts setup and isn’t quite right…

One thing that isn’t well documented is what happens to Excel is there is a blank in a cell. By experimentation it turns out that the wildcard “” does *not match a blank cell, so you need to make sure that you have something in every cell if you want to match it.  Interestingly, stackoverflow…

Man the old days of Excel are long gone, now you can generate incredibly powerful array actions so easily when doing the equivalent of database lookups. As ablebits.com explains this thing starts to look like APL: So for instance to add all the cells in column C where column A has the text “apple” and…

Using Mac Excel heavily and it is good that some of my favorite commands are still there and there is a long shortcut list Most Mac keyboards, you need the additional FN key To Press Open the Formula Builder FN + SHIFT + F3 Repeat the last Find (Find Next) FN + SHIFT + F4…

A great conversation with Vlad about setting up different servers in a development environment. Many of these loads are today run in virtual machines on a single system. The latest hypervisors have reduced the VM overhead to 5% so it makes so much sense to run them virtually particularly if you dedicate a slice of…

Well, this is one shall we say “manly” laptop. I do have to say I’m spoiled by the industrial design of Apple. But nonetheless, it is certainly powerful (if amazingly thick and bulky). Here are some tips, tricks and traps: Tricks on Magic Keys The documentation is pretty unclear, but there is a BIOS setup…

I’ve been using MythTV pretty well along with XBMC. XBMC’s add-on even lets you watch MythTV recording from a HD HomeRun Prime from XBMC and it all worked fine on Mavericks. Now in the Yosemite world and also the latest XBMC now called Kodi and the new MythTV 0.27. Here are the steps: Yosemite upgrade…

Well, built the second of four Haswell towers based on the SG-10B mini-tower using the ASRock Z97m OC Formula with the Noctua NH-L12 and the Scythe Rev B: Scythe Rev B. This is a low profile fan unit. The main problem is there is no clearance possible with the heat sinks on the regulator. Also…

Some of the older applications like Unify for the Mac, need Java 6. The latest Mavericks removes the Java 6 and even if you install Java 8, it doesn’t work, so you need to install it from the Apple site as 2014-001

The SSD pricing is sure dynamic. So it’s nice that Tom’s Hardware updates this regularly which updates the Anandtech Best SSDs for July 2014 as well as StorageReview.com which did a good comparison of the Evo 850 Pro, Evo 850, Evo 840 and the Sandisk Extreme Pro which showed the 1TB Evo 850 very good…