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

Back two years ago, I was trying to use hashdeep to make sure that my files particularly JPEGs were not bit rotting. I’ve had dozens of JPEGs die in the past because of bit rot. I had a bad RAID controller 10 years ago that killed a bunch of JPEGs, so I’ve been obsessed with…

Well this was some work, but we have the 1.2Gbe/35Mbps and I wanted to figure out a way to do this with my existing hardware, it turns out with some tricks to getting this to work right, but if you want to do something similar here are key tricks. I could have also gotten a…

Ok some truly miscellaneous things on our Amazon shopping list: Shop vac replacement cartridge filter and bags We have shop vac 6 gallon vacuum and it works great, but the filter is completely shot because we used it to vacuum 10 pounds of baking soda that was soaking up mineral oil (a long story!), so…

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…