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

Ok, so we’ve been using Apple Home and the underlying Homekit for the last two years. Given the privacy benefits, we ended up turning off Amazon Alexa, Ring and Google Home as well. The main issue is that there only a limited number of manufacturers who support Homekit natively. So for instance Eufy does a…

It does seem like so many applications want access to the Accessibility settings of MacOS. In looking at my own login, I see no less than 12 applications that want access to it. Why and what does it mean and should I be concerned? Well, the core of it is that it is not really…

Well, Steve asked me what’s the best way to document your bike tour. He and Deb are going on an awesome ride across America to raise awareness for stroke. So what are the tools you need for the road: Helmet and Bicycle Cameras There are quite a few action cameras with bicycle mounts that you…

OK, well there is always a bridge too far. In this case, I go the Keychron K6 hot-swappable which is a really nice Bluetooth keyboard that costs just $85 from Amazon but the next step is to actually take the thing apart and stick foam and tape into it. Long story short, it turns out…

OK, this post is long involved and very specific, but a few things, with Comcast really dropping the year long contract price of the 1.2Gbps to $90/month plus $30/month for unlimited data, that’s quite an incredible deal, when you realize this is just $5 more than the 900Mbps and $10 more than 600Mbps. So in…

Well, it’s that time of year again, so after the 2020 list of really great olive oils that are also available on this Amazon list, its time in 2021 and we’ve settle on some favorites, but its a good time to read Best Olive Oils from the NY Competition to see what’s wonder (gold medals galore) and available generally (eg Amazon) so…

OK, this took a while to figure out. But, I’ve had a Rega P3 turntable that is plugged into a Rega Phono Mini that suddenly stopped working. It was strange the LED looked on but no sound came out. Finally, the hint for debugging is that a phono preamp amplifies the low signal generated by…

OK, time for my annual, I really don’t like Comcast. They just love to raise prices without much notification and then you always have to go back and sign up for a new annual plan. So today, the issues are that I was on a $80/month plan for 400Mbps (and a lowly 10Mbps up but…

Well, this replication stuff sure does work, so now from a Synology, here is a backup strategy that is pretty good for me: Synology Redundancy and UPS Well, this isn’t really back up, but to increase the reliability of any disks, you really want them RAID protected. That is when you write to the disk…

OK, one maddening thing that happened is one of my MacBooks has a tiny, as in 256GB hard drive. This is just too small for most uses particularly if you have lots of iCloud Photos or big github repos. I have both, so what are some solutions? Slim down the random files Well, if you…