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

Kodi (formerly XBMC, formerly Xbox Media Connect) has been an awesome tool for us to have a nice front end so that handles all the DVDs and other things we have digitally in the house. Since nVidia Shield is really an Android device, this is really an Android application. It…

ARgh, yet another fall out of the Corona Virus that they don’t talk about much, but if you are buying from Amazon, getting things from China doesn’t seem to be a problem. But that’s not true for all shippers. I ordered something directly from corsair.com and this came directly from…

OK, when you have terabytes of data at home, you definitely will. have losses. I’ve had a bad RAID array that corrupted a bunch of JPEGs and it is super sad. So what’s the solution to this: If you are using BTRFS, then you can turn on bit scrubbing. This…

OK, lots of opinions will vary about the ultimate effects and so forth, but here’s a collection of various people’s opinions about the extent of it. Some are pretty technical, but for a nerd like me understand the mathematics of epidemiology is pretty interesting, so without comment. These are not…

I never really understood where iMovie Theater was coming from. Once you make an iMovie, then it went into a separate video sharing system called Theater. Well, that has all gone away now and you are now supposed to put the movies into iCloud Photos. And yes, I know that…

OK, now that I’m all btrfs on this Synology, there are ton of implications. The big one is that this is a Copy-on-write file system. That means, that, normally when you do something like a massive 1TB file with other files systems like ext4 You are actually literally copying. So…

OK, I finally got a message I’ve been avoiding for two years. One of my disk arrays is finally at capacity. So time now in 2020 to think about what to do about home storage. Alot has changed in the last two years most notably: Disk sizes have grown incredibly.…

SVB is one of the top bankers for high tech companies. They have a nice program for startups to get access and be part of the community. At the same time, the interface has some tricky parts so here are some tips: SVB does have some nice discount codes for…

Wow a cool side effect of the switch to btrfs for Synology is that backups have now become easy. With b-tree file systems, doing a backup is as simple as doing a snapshot. When ever there is a change, it will just remember what has changed. Another advantage is that…

Well two friends have been asking me about buying laptops and general advice. Here are some things to know: Laptop longevity. No one really talks about this, but if you buy a $700 laptop and it lasts three years before it falls apart, it’s not necessarily cheaper than a $1,500…