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

Well, I bit the bullet today and upgraded our Apple Home to use the new protocols. The main issue is that it keeps complaining that one of my Macbook Pros, the 2017 model, has not been updated to the latest firmware. Also, my oldest Apple TV is not compatible, this is another case, where the…

OK, getting a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is useful if you run out of storage and your Network Attached Storage (NAS). The main reason for this is bandwidth, if you use a Thunderbolt 4 DAS for instance, then you are running at 40Gbps vs Gigabit Ethernet at 1Gbps or if you are direct connected, then…

OK, this is a strange, but amazingly wonderful thing, there’s a WordPress plug-in that converts every post from a WordPress site into a Mastodon one. So now if you search for @rich@tongfamily.com on Mastodon or Pixelfed, you will see the latest posts from this website. Basically, it emulates a few cool protocols, there is webfinger…

Well, I just got the Elgato S60+ which lets my Sony A7R3 push 4K resolution output, but today, I finally got my Shure V83F microphone working. Hooking it up is actually pretty confusing since there are so many different ways to do it, but the short notes are: Setting up the filters for Shure VF83F…

OK, I’ve been running Tongfamily.com on Digital Ocean for the last five years and it has been fairly trouble-free (particularly when I added the 2GB swapfile) to prevent out-of-memory problems, but the last two days it has been crashing. It turns out that my simple installation with a 25GB disk has been running out of…

While you can get coffee from Starbucks or from Safeway, it’s fun to try some more artisanal varieties. I’ve JBC before and they have an interesting and rotating selection. Plus, you can get them with free shipping if you order three or more and there are various other deals. I am not a coffee expert,…

I had never seen this message before, but if you use certain advanced features then you have to get rid of your old devices. The two break points are using Advanced Data Protection which means that everything in iCloud uses end to end encryption. Including all york photos and things. The big trade off is…

OK, they just changed the way that Google Workspace works, it used to be free unlimited storage and now it is 5TB per person, so time to figure out how to move things away from Google Workspace. This got me thinking about what we really use Google for, the main thing is the spam filter…

OK, what is going on with the watch bands I haven’t gotten yet, so a companion to the last post about bands I’ve gotten, I would say I haven’t found the perfect set by any means, but Tech Radar has a bunch that I should try (these are mainly the name brands I’ve been thinking…

Well, there are a million Apple Watch bands out there from the incredibly expensive Roo ones that literally cost $2. I decided to buy an assortment based on the reviews out there and tell you that a $99 Apple band is really worth it. The main surprise is that the big standard Apple bands are…