Tong Family

Ok, while I like Apple Homekit for its privacy, it definitely is a little confusing when you are managing multiple homes and lots of devices. So here are some notes: 1. As John says, if you move say an Eufy camera, there is no UI to remove them. So you have to factory reset them…

Sometimes, I end up having conversations that feel like it is really “turtles all the way down.” This is from the Akupara (अकूपार) of Hindu mythology that says that the world Is held up by a turtle. When you ask, well what does the turtle stand on, another turtle. It’s just turtles all the way…

Well, I’ve tried to avoid this for years, but now I have to develop and work on Windows. I first tried WSL2, Windows Subsystem for Linux, but that has just been a mess, the main problems are: The file systems are completely different, you can’t for instance write a .profile to run on Windows and…

Well, I’m embarrassed to say that I did skip the rest the PRAM and SMC step in doing all the debugging and this I seem to dimly recall I had this problem before, but some configuration file was deeply messed up and just doing this reset did the trick. I ran for a day in…

OK, I bit the bullet and wiped the hard drive and started all over with, but problems continue. I’m getting Kernel Panics when I’m plugged into the CalDigit docking station and a no name dongle. The panics are typically, “Freed zone element element has been modified” which seems like a driver problem. As an aside,…

OK, I got the two new wrist pads and here is how well they work: JEDIA Wristpad and Mouse Rest. This is nice in that it has a no slip lower surface and it is firm enough, the main problem is that on a mechanical keyboard which is pretty high, it is just not high…

I had a few goals in the last decade, one was to get fluent in Chinese enough to talk with my mom every day (check!), the other was to get back to being technical and part of that was being good enough to come up with intellectual property. Sam just pointed out that a host…

I’m probably 20 blog posts behind. The strategy here is that if I learn something new, I just leave it open as a tab in Safari, this works really well, because you can share Safari links on any Apple device, so when I want to find something old that I’ve been working on the discipline…

Ok, I admit it, I mistakenly thought there was a tie between Apple Pay and payment to the Apple App Store. Turns out these are completely unrelated. I twizzled the Apple Pay payment order to use my normal Visa card, but Apple App Store and Apple Subscriptions kept on going to a different card. Well,…

Well, I’m really confused, my most important mission critical application, Zoom, is hard crashing my MacOS, so this is a good lesson in debugging things like this, but here are the symptoms: I have an old MacBook Pro (2016) running Big Sur, it has a Logitech BRIO hooked up to it via USB 2.0 cables….