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

Ok, doing the final purchase analysis as usual, the process was: Initial price on Amazon Check price on Newegg Check similar prices through rewards portals (BoA) to Rakutan, Overstock as these guys have better prices usually. See what the rebates are on with cashbackmonitor.com and what coupons are with slick…

Ok, nothing like learning a new stack everyday. It sure feels like I do that these days. This one is digitalocean.com running node.js, running the ghost blogging platform using handlebar for templating and bootstrap for the front end. What fun! Here are some tips: Digitalocean’s one click install really works.…

Well it is probably unfashionable to still use the same editor that I first learned in college, but heck, vi is still around. It is arcane and hard to figure out, but man is it efficient. There are two modes, edit and command, but that means that your fingers never…

Well, Twitter’s Bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework and it works against just about any backend. WordPress, Ghost, whatever. So it’s a good time to figure out how to use it: The most minimal form w3schools explains that it is entirely hosted on the web, so you just need…

Well we are testing ghost and getting away from WordPress. It’s been a great ride, but nice to learn a new system that is running on node.js and which is much simpler. I’m going to run the two in parallel for a while at tongfamily.com and richtong.org, so stay tuned.…

Wow this is a little complicated but getting Digital Ocean to work is a little complicated, but here are some tips: Ssh into Digital Ocean Droplet When you into the thing, you are using the root password, so you need to look at your droplet IP. Unlike things like bluehost…

Ok last post on the file server topic. Vlad pointed out that there are two storage layers here. That is near line SAS plus a PC3500 when it’s available for high speed ssd. So with 20 slots in a Norco 4220 you could easily add a caching Sata ssd layer…

Well, I’ve been much more focused this year on using portals and getting cash back rewards. I would say about 30% of the times I’ve tried this, the rebate doesn’t work. And folks are smart, it isn’t worth it to make a transaction for $1 work right and there is…

Wow you can see why Tesla is so valuable. I had no idea. The i3 is actually doing pretty well  which was surprising: The Focus Electric has been an absolute sales dud for Ford, although not nearly as bad as the Cadillac ELR. Through September of 2014, Ford only managed to sell…