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

OK, it’s been three long years since I’ve used a dedicated bare-metal Ubuntu machine. The last time was with house-made machine learning machines when the Titan was a big system, but we were amongst the first to build quad GPU machines running the then very new Ubuntu 14.04. Now of course the world has matured…

In these days of high gas prices. I was curious to see what the real energy cost savings are right to now. Back in 2017, we had the option to get a $5K rebate or unlimited free supercharging. This was because they dropped the price of the car by $5K before we took delivery and…

Ugh, I’ve been trying to limp along with an Apple Watch Series 3 and it’s been hard. The thing doesn’t last very long battery-wise and is slow. Also at some point, I took a huge piece of glass out of the right corner but it still worked. Finally, it has begun to seize up. What…

I can’t believe how dependent I’ve gotten on two features. The first is iCloud Share Tab Groups, this gives you a single view of all your tab groups across all your devices. This is super convenient for those of us with multiple chores. Like taking care of Mom, the home, and having a non-profit and…

There are very few WiFi channels and most are congested, so the quest goes on for more spectrum and channels to avoid everyone else WiFi Access points. The 2.4 GHz band, the ISM band (Industrial, Scientific and Medical), is super crowded with only three non-overlapping 20MHz channels at 1, 6, and 11. And when 5…

Docker has become the default for lots of reproducible build system, but the sad thing is that although you get a defined image, the specification, the Dockerfile itself, is not reproducible. That’s because most Dockerfile do not have pinned dependencies: This is a simple example that starts ubuntu, installs some python junk, and then you…

Well, now that world has moved so far over to USB C, there are so many more choices of chargers. You can get a USB C charger with 200W and multiple connectors, but it is super confusing what works with what. And when you plug multiple devices in, how much power do you get out.…

This is one of the more confusing aspects of WordPress. Yes, I know, I’ve transitioned all the sites that I own to Hugo (except for tongfamily.com and calvintong.com), but I’ve been stuck on WordPress for a simple reason. Editing a Hugo site is a big pain. There is supposed to be a Netlify CMS but…

Well, the new MacOS Monterey adds third-party device support for battery life. This is great, but unfortunately, the Anne Pro keyboards that I have don’t honor it. They always report 100% battery even when dead, the only reliable way to tell battery life is to start the Obinskit utility and see what it says. As…

OK, two quick random things that have made my life much better just from discovery USB Copy Crashes. I’ve had full crashes on my Synology DS1812+ box which I’ve never seen before. The entire UI locks up, the machine is on, but doesn’t respond to ssh and doesn’t do anything. Finally tracked this down to…