OK, it’s gotten complicated again to figure out how to book a hotel, there is no single low price anymore, but here is a guide. First select an area that you want to go to, then you have to compare the net prices taking into account both the portal bonus and the offers: Chase: Portal […]

Well, I’ve had one of these water flossers for years and they do seem to work. So along with ultrasonic toothbrushes, this seems like an essential Smart EDC for everyone, so what can you get now? In looking at lots of reviews it’s pretty clear that they work better than regular floss. There are lots […]

While you can do this probably with sed or awk, split is definitely easier. A hat tip to @guy for telling us all about it. Basically, if you want to split a file into chunks of 1,000 lines, it will do this and add a prefix, so if you have log.txt, then split log.txt will […]

Here getting the podcast player doesn’t quite work from Blubrry, but the Pocket Casts is working. You can subscribe. And here are the show notes. We annotate everything (just to prove we know what we are talking about and also the errata as speaking contemporaneously results in errors for me). But here are Paul and […]

Ok, starting up the new podcast world for the first time, we should shortly have the new PTCast for Paul and Tong’s Excellent Podcast published here (thanks to Anchor.fm and YouTube). We had our first technical rehearsal. We will get Open Broadcast Studio up at some point, but we did learn how to make it […]

Well, I’ve had an old Yubikey 4C around for ages and tried to get it to work a few years ago. But with all the concerns about security, I’ve always wanted to understand this. Plus, Apple is trying to get everyone to be passwordless and that is a good thing. Using 1Password is great, but […]

Well, I’ve never actually had this problem before, but my MacBook Pro 2016 has been freezing and in trying to get it work and sadly this looks like it might be a RAM problem in the machine as I am getting a hash mismatch error. I tried a reinstall and I’m hoping this works, but […]

I’ve had a huge number of different heart rate monitors over the years. I still have my very first chest bands made by Polar and Suunto. These needed a proprietary watch and then the batteries would die and they are not user replaceable so you have to send them off. In the last five years, […]

Inspired by our latest conversations with Paul and Deon to restart our Podcast. We started two years ago just as the pandemic started using anchor.fm and did get distribution across no less than ten different distribution systems like Apple, Google, Spotify, and even Tunein (for Tesla), but it wasn’t a format that was particularly interesting. […]

So what is all this then about cables? As previous posts have shown the differences between USB C as a connector type and what runs on it are super confusing. But the essential points when buying cables are to realize the data protocols are completely separate from the amount of power delivered, so the relevant […]